Product Stewardship is becoming increasingly recognized as "the responsible and ethical management of the health, safety and environmental aspects of a product throughout its total life cycle. Product Stewardship is Responsible Care© applied to products. Product Stewardship improves market confidence. By defining and pursuing common goals throughout the supply chain, we can achieve benefits for all the businesses involved. No company operates in isolation. Everyone involved in the production, handling, use and disposal of chemicals has a shared responsibility to ensure their safe management and use. By adopting a programme of Product Stewardship, every company can play its part in protecting humans and the environment from potential harm" ¹.

BSEF has already carried out Product Stewardship programs in cooperation with customer industries by collecting data on workplace conditions, consumer exposure and end-product recycling BSEF has widened the scope of its Product Stewardship actions by launching a programme to reduce industrial emissions of brominated flame retardants. This programme launched in 2005 is VECAP: The Voluntary Emissions Control Action Programme.

Environmental monitoring data show increasing levels of some brominated flame retardants (BFRs) in the environment near to their industrial production and use. This is the case for Deca-BDE. While Deca-BDE does not present a risk in terms of toxicity, BSEF nevertheless finds it unacceptable that emissions of a BFR should be increasing in the environment and is acting to ensure that these environmental trends are reversed.

The vast majority of emissions of BFRs to the environment happen during their manufacture and the manufacturing processes of those materials (in particular, plastics and textiles) that depend on BFRs to meet high levels of fire safety. While there exist industrial plants where emissions are clearly minimized and well controlled, too often industrial plants emit environmentally significant quantities of the chemicals they use.

VECAP ensures that emissions of BFRs are minimized in a deliberate programme involving the BFR manufacturing industry and its customers. VECAP includes actions such as:

• sampling of emissions from industrial plants in the supply chain
• estimation of total emission levels per application
• definition of tolerable levels of emissions in cooperation with the supply chain and regulatory authorities
• assistance to the supply chain to implement emission reductions where tolerable levels are being exceeded
• measurement of the effectiveness of emission reductions through further sampling of industrial plant emissions and in the environment

VECAP has also been extended to the US and Japan. For further information contact Product Steward, Paul Adriaenssens at qualipa@skynet.be, or download the VECAP Annual Report at www.vecap.info

¹ http://www.cefic.be/activities/hse/rc/ProdStew/Leaflet/leaflet.htm