Developing Safer Materials at Dow
Originally published in Dow's 2022 INtersections Progress Report
OUR APPROACH
With a portfolio of more than 12,000 products that support approximately 10,000 customers, we know that how we manufacture, distribute and enable the proper use and disposal of our products can have a large and meaningful impact on the environment. Our vision is a future where every material we bring to market is sustainable for our people and our planet.
Learn more: Blueprint for Product Safety
2022 ACTIONS
At Dow, creating safer materials is a continuous journey made possible through innovation, design and more predictive, enabling technologies. In 2022, we:
- Earned recognition for new innovations, many with improved health and safety profiles. In 2022, Dow received eight Edison Awards, six R&D 100 Awards by R&D Magazine and three BIG Innovation Awards from Business Intelligence Group.
- Used digital technologies to predict safer alternatives. In 2022, Dow and CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, collaborated to develop Smart Search, an Edison Awardnominated artificial intelligence tool that can help our R&D team refine searches for new substances by properties, including by hazard classifications.
- Advanced our Safer Materials roadmap, outlining and launching enterprise actions for continuous improvement.
- Proactively conducted more than 50 business risk reviews, comprehensively assessing new innovations, raw materials and/or applications for risks, and implemented appropriate risk management measures where necessary.
Open and Transparent Chemistry: Taking Action on Our Safer Materials Roadmap
In 2022, we identified three work tracks to help us advance our corporate roadmap to developing safer materials. These work tracks are:
- Characterizing our portfolio, which will build upon our history of strong risk management and our current risk characterization of products. In 2023, Dow commits to publishing a high-level guide of use-hazard combinations that carry with them a degree of inherent safety and those where more scrutiny or more detailed risk assessment and proof of safe handling is required.
- Prioritize substances of concern, which involves taking strategic actions within our businesses to address all parts of the product life cycle, from investing in clean upstream manufacturing technologies to reducing facility emissions to restricting downstream uses of some substances and utilizing our strong innovation pipeline to develop safer alternatives.
- Development of next-generation safer chemistry, which focuses on increasing integration of predictive toxicology tools into early-stage R&D.
Innovation: Developing Biodegradable Beauty Products
In 2022, Dow’s MaizeCare™ Clarity Polymer was recognized with two prestigious innovation awards – an R&D 100 Award and a BIG Sustainability Product of the Year award. This biodegradable polymer, derived from corn starch, offers curl retention when styling your hair, then breaks down readily when it washes out and down the drain. The polymer is one example of Dow’s growing portfolio of bio-derived and bio-degradable products that deliver on consumer demands for affordable products that are safe for humans and the environment without compromising performance.
