There has been increasing desire for products that are environmentally friendly. To insure that products can be sold and distributed on a global basis, manufacturers must take into account a wide variety of environmental legal requirements. Several different techniques have been developed for evaluating environmental issues that may arise when formulating products. In one approach there has been developed a “grading system” of suppliers as it relates to their environmental practices. The environmental history of raw material suppliers and their current environmental procedures are taken into account by various agencies that assign suppliers environmental grades. These grades are made available to purchasing managers, who may base their purchasing decisions on such history.
There are also environmental labeling systems which consider possible adverse environmental effects of products when determining if the product qualifies to bear the label. Such systems have been used by governments and non-governmental organizations having a reputation regarding environmental matters and will be used in their assessment when providing their seal of approval or equivalent.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,096,084 describes a method for categorizing ingredients with the goal of formulating products having a reduced environmental “footprint.” In accordance with the method in this patent, an ingredient can be assigned to an environmental class by choosing two categories of environmental concern from among many optional environmental categories. For example, aquatic toxicology, ultimate biodegradability, acute human toxicity lethal dose, European Union environmental classification, supplier source, and other significant concerns are disclosed as categories that can be considered for classifying a surfactant. In this method, the categories that can be considered for classifying an ingredient differ depending on the purpose of the ingredient; hence a single chemical could be assigned to two or more different environmental classes if it were added to a product for two or more different purposes, or if it were added to two or more similar products for two or more different purposes.
Also known are systems which adjust the grades of components used in a product by their relative weight in that product. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,933,765 discloses an environmental grading system in which a product containing multiple components has each of its input components provided with a numerical score based on toxicity. Each component is compared to a single published limit (such as a Dutch PPT Telecom standard) and a numerical value for that component is assigned. The scores are then weighted based on the relative percentage, by weight, of the raw material in the final product to provide an overall score for the resulting product. Regardless of the application of the raw material, only one possible score is provided for a given raw material chemical which is weighted by its prominence in the final product.
These environmental grading or rating systems do not provide an optimal system for formulating products where the use and potential environmental exposure patterns of all the products considered are similar. Methods that rely on the environmental performance of suppliers are not optimal for companies that use multiple sources for a single chemical component used in different regions or at different times. Methods that require each chemical component of a formulated product to be categorized depending on the component's function, which allows one chemical to achieve different environmental classifications as a result of the categorization, fail to recognize that the potential environmental effects of the component are not dependent on its function in a product, but rather, on its intrinsic environmental fate and effects characteristics and its exposure concentration in the environment, which are independent of its function in a product. Methods that consider only one aspect of environmental performance, such as toxicity, ignore environmentally relevant data that are readily available for many chemical components used n formulated products.
There exists a need for methods that evaluate the environmental impact of ingredients used in personal care products and methods for developing personal care products having a relatively safer environmental impact. These methods would evaluate the potential environmental impact of various chemical components in formulated personal care products and provide a decision support framework to reduce the potential environmental impact of these products based on those evaluations. It is desired that a system be developed for evaluating the environmental impact of chemical components and for formulating products having improved environmental characteristics. If a component in a product is known to have negative environmental attributes, environmental grading may be a deciding factor in determining whether that component is incorporated into the final product. In addition, there exists a need for a method that would allow a company to track its performance in reducing the environmental impact of the products that it produces.