The ZDHC Foundation has published the first version of the Commodity Chemicals Guide, to help mitigate the risk of commodity chemicals. By ILM.

ZDHC notes that the guide builds towards its 2030 goals by encouraging the fashion industry to evaluate sellers of commodity chemicals such as sodium sulphate, ammonia or bleach, based on standard criteria, as well as engage in responsible purchasing and storage of such chemicals for the protection of workers, communities and the environment.

Commodity chemicals are defined by ZDHC as “single substances or chemical compounds whose chemical structure is well-known, have a single CAS number and their use is to create conditions or act as an aid in a process. Two commodity chemicals produced by different manufacturers can be the same and can be interchangeable. Commodity chemicals usually do not stay on the final article”.

The new guide provides a list of commodity chemicals that should be responsibly managed as part of the ZDHC input chemical management implementation, classifies the ZDHC list of commodity chemicals into “virgin” and “non-virgin” chemicals for assessing ZDHC MRSL risks and provides best practice advice on: evaluating commodity chemical sellers; storage, handling and transportation precautions; and Details Root Cause Analysis (RCA) for ZDHC MRSL non-conformities in wastewater test reports as per the ZDHC Wastewater Guidelines.

Christ Chen, Chemical & Wastewater Management Env. Program at Adidas said: “Commodity chemicals have been one of our annoyances for many years. They are simple chemistries, but large amounts of usage makes them inescapable in the input chemical management system of textile and footwear industry.

“Thanks to ZDHC and their Commodity chemical Guide, it can help our suppliers properly mitigate the risk of commodity chemicals and reduce the negative impact to the environment and our products.”
You can download the Commodity Chemicals Guide V1.0 from the ZDHC website.