New Chemical Safety Assessment Tools Developed to Help the Electronics Sector Clean Up its Supply Chains

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Last week, green chemical solutions advocate Clean Production Action unveiled GreenScreen Certified for Cleaners & Degreasers in Manufacturing, a tool to assess chemical safety in the industrial sector.

The new certification, developed alongside Apple, aims to expand safe chemical use worldwide by increasing access to information, facilitating transparency, and encouraging innovation. Apple used CPA’s former product, GreenScreen® for Safer Chemicals, to clean up the chemicals in its supply chain. One hundred percent of Apple’s supplier final-assembly sites now utilize only approved safe cleaners.

GreenScreen Certified focuses on electronics, which, due to the wide range of hazardous chemicals they contain, are under increasing scrutiny from regulators and environmental health and safety organizations.

GreenScreen Certified’s standard has three levels of certification: Silver, Gold, and Platinum. All levels require manufacturers to,

• Disclose all intentionally added chemicals in their products.
• Avoid more than 2,000 known chemicals of high concern including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), along with other problematic chemicals and chemical classes listed in the defined Restricted Substances List.
• Meet skin and eye irritation requirements.
• Perform analytic testing for substances to demonstrate the absence of priority restricted chemicals and chemical classes in their products.

The Gold and Platinum levels require increasingly strict limits on the amount of impurities and residuals permitted.

“Knowing which products are safer for workers in the electronics sector is a complicated task,” said Shari Franjevic, GreenScreen Program Manager. “GreenScreen Certified for Cleaners & Degreasers used in Manufacturing now provides assurance that these products are third party certified and free of thousands of chemicals of high concern. We are very proud to supply another tool in the toolbox for safer chemistry innovation.”

More than 1,000 chemicals are commonly used to manufacture electronic products and their components. Many of them, including lead, mercury, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants have documented harms to human health. The green chemistry field works to develop alternatives to these and other hazardous substances.