Product Stewardship
at ESIG

The ESIG Product Stewardship team and its subgroups have been actively working on developing and improving our materials and tools to promote the safe and sustainable use of solvents.

Meeting

Films revision with SIA

Two film projects are ongoing with our UK sister association the Solvents Industry Associations (SIA),

For the gloves film, the script was revised and approved last year. Everything was ready to start filming, was then delayed due to the COVID-19 crisis since the camera crew is based in the UK and site visits are not allowed in Europe or the UK.

We have recently started revising the solvents and static electricity film, which is 10 years old. It turned out that the technical content is still good and valid. The main reason to reshoot the film is to have it on a digital format and modernise the surroundings.

The solvents and static electricity film and the flammability guide make a comprehensive package about the same subject, which is why they are both being revised at the same time.

Human exposure database

With the support of the Institute of Occupational Medicine (IOM – Edinburgh), ESIG has updated and renewed its human exposure database for solvents. It contains exposure data on a wide range of solvents and key applications. This database is the largest single source of solvent exposure data available to the industry and a broader audience. 

You will find information and measurements from literature on oxygenated and hydrocarbon solvents exposure published over the past 20 years (1998 – until now), including a quality assessment. The previous edition was stopped in 2008 and had never been made fully accessible outside ESIG membership. Anyone can have access to the new and updated version, search information and download it. 

The data demonstrate that the Chemical Safety Assessments under REACH are accurate and qualitative enough to ensure the reliability of assessments of safe use for workers and consumers and provide the opportunity of doing higher tier assessments for key solvent uses to show these uses are safe under real-life conditions.

Pexels Background

Specific Environmental Release Categories (SpERCs)

The NEXPO (Nordic Exposure Group) SpERCs evaluation project, an initiative by the Nordic Member States to evaluate a set of SpERCs using the quality criteria developed by the Industry SpERC Taskforce  under ENES (Exchange Network on Exposure Scenarios), was finalised with the publication of the Nexpo report in March 2021. The quality criteria template was a good tool for assessing the content of factsheets and background documents after its application to evaluate a set of 27 different SpERCs. Among these, we could identify six ESIG/ESVOC SpERCs, which were evaluated in the project, with five of them receiving the highest grade as “good” (indicating no need for further improvement) and one as “acceptable” (i.e. room for improvement or aspects to be verified). After this encouraging outcome, ESIG is now further reviewing the remaining SpERCs. We will focus on the ones which currently have release factors based solely on expert judgement. The aim is to substantiate the derivation of values from data to further improve the overall quality of the environmental exposure assessment of our substances.

Overview solvents@work

On 9thSeptember (from 15:00 to 16:00) we will organise another webinar – to give you an overview of all the Product Stewardship (PST) materials available.  ESIG PST materials, consisting of guidelines, posters and videos, explain how to safely handle solvents in the workplace and help manufacturers comply with the highest level of safety standards.

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