Questions to Ask Your Chemical Suppliers

Do you buy chemicals from suppliers that follow Responsible Care®? Responsible Care is the chemical industry’s commitment to continually improve operational and product environmental, health and safety (EHS) performance.  Most importantly for you as a customer, is the recent adoption of the Product Safety Code.  Key components of the value chain commitment of the Code are diagrammed below [link]:

Questions to ask your suppliers:

 1.  Do they follow Responsible Care® or a similar program? [1] If not, do they have a strong corporate program directed at life cycle environmental, health and safety?

They should be able to demonstrate their commitment to safe and sustainable life cycle management: raw material acquisition, energy use, transportation, processing, use and disposal associated with their products.

  2.   What is their process to “foster product safety management and information exchange along the value chain” and how do you become part of it? [2]

 This is a two-way, ongoing communication effort. Suppliers should know the properties of their chemistries, but they may not know how you and your customers are handling their products. A Safety Data Sheet alone may be insufficient – tell them what your needs are.

  3.     What are they doing to continuously improve the safety of their products?

They should be able to demonstrate a process to identify and respond to new information that may warrant changes in chemical management.

The Responsible Care Product Stewardship Code is new. Management practices are not required to be fully implemented until 2017.  But most companies are well on their way to having the management practices in place and should be able to tell you about their current product stewardship programs and plans for improvement.

The most important thing for you to do is to maintain upstream and downstream communication in your value chain!