The Safer Chemistry IMPACT FUND: Revolutionizing Chemical Safety Through Shared Data & Partnerships

Posted By: Bill Walsh Community, In the News,

As the demand for safer chemical products rises and regulatory pressures intensify, companies face the challenge of moving away from hazardous substances while avoiding regrettable substitutions. To make this transition, a clear understanding of their products' chemical profiles is key, and access to robust data from industry peers is crucial. Such information not only guides decision-making but also empowers companies to find safer chemical alternatives faster and meet evolving regulations, fostering a more sustainable and responsible industry.

Bill Walsh, founder of the Safer Chemistry IMPACT FUND, is at the forefront of this critical dialogue. The IMPACT FUND is dedicated to transforming how companies approach their chemical formulations, promoting alternatives that prioritize human health and environmental sustainability. With a mission rooted in advocating for responsible chemical practices,the goal of  this blended capital fund is to embed safer chemistry metrics and tools in consumer-facing supply chains as a standard operating procedure, in order to systematically reduce and ultimately eliminate toxic chemical pollution.

The IMPACT FUND  provides grants to non-profit organizations that are helping companies rethink their chemical practices by driving the adoption of safer alternatives. By partnering with industry leaders and focusing on collaboration across the value chain, the fund promotes responsible chemical formulation, showcasing proven strategies and real-world success stories that demonstrate the positive effects of these changes. This approach empowers businesses to adopt safer alternatives while supporting the shift toward a more sustainable and responsible industry.

The Safer Chemistry IMPACT FUND and Change Chemistry share a commitment to advancing safer chemical practices. They align on key principles, such as cross-industry and cross-value chain collaboration, breaking down silos between sectors, and sharing data and knowledge across companies. Both are rooted in a hazard-first approach. Both also emphasize the importance of chemical innovation and transparency in driving meaningful change.

Change Chemistry spoke with Bill Walsh to discuss his journey, the evolution of the IMPACT FUND, and how it's driving meaningful change across industries.

Change Chemistry: How did the Safer Chemistry IMPACT FUND get started?

Bill: Data has always been central to my work because I believe that good data is a point of alignment among various stakeholders and interest groups, even when they don’t agree on much else. While at Habitable (then called the Healthy Building Network) circa 2006, we developed the Pharos Project, a database that allowed users to quickly identify chemical hazards based on government lists and industry RSLs (restricted substance lists). The Pharos database consolidated this information, setting the highest global standard for sharing accurate information about listed chemical hazards.

Several years ago, while leading a foundation that supported nonprofits working to reduce the impact of hazardous chemicals, I began supporting  ChemFORWARD. ChemFORWARD built on this foundation by creating a platform that goes beyond RSLs and allows users to find functional alternatives based on robust Chemical Hazard Assessments (CHAs) that are 1) fully assessed by an accredited toxicology firm and verified by an independent toxicologist, and 2) identified as safer based on their inherent hazard properties. In that capacity, ChemFORWARD advisory board members approached me with the idea of creating a fund to scale this infrastructure, increase the adoption and use of CHAs, and create the Data Trust—a non-profit, publicly accessible database that helps companies systematically replace hazardous chemicals with verified safer alternatives. I loved the idea. I supported its development while working in philanthropy, and then agreed to become the first Director in March of 2024.

Currently, companies often work in silos, solving their own problems and seeking safer alternatives privately. But ChemFORWARD has convincingly demonstrated that the scale of the problem is more manageable when companies collaborate. For example, while it might be true  that there are tens of thousands of untested chemicals, the number routinely used in a specific business sector is often much smaller and manageable—we now have data analytics to prove that. thousand.

Shared data is a game-changer. It reduces both the cost and the time needed to identify safer alternatives. One great example of this is Chemworks, an open registry of verified safer chemical cleaners and degreasers for the electronics industry.

Collaboration is an accelerator to safer chemistry identification and adoption. We’ve seen a recent example of this with the Know Better Do Better Collaborative, the groundbreaking effort among major beauty retailers, brands, and ingredient suppliers to characterize the chemicals used in their products, fill data gaps and systematically reduce hazards. 

By working together with shared data, companies can close gaps that would take much longer to address individually, transforming what seems like a daunting challenge into something achievable.

Change Chemistry: Tell us more about how that data is collected.

Bill: That hard work is done by ChemFORWARD. What the IMPACT FUND does is promote the use of the ChemFORWARD platform and standardized assessments.

Companies’ hazard assessments are created by qualified toxicology firms and added to the Data Trust. The assessment is then peer-reviewed and verified by an independent toxicologist to further ensure its accuracy. This offers a higher level of confidence compared to a company presenting its own unverified assessment. We’re seeing more companies recognize the benefits of putting their assessments in a verified public repository for this added transparency as well as the ongoing maintenance of the data.

This shared data repository is growing. There has been robust participation from both the electronics and beauty and personal care industries in commissioning CHAs. Some CHAs have been commissioned by environmental groups and philanthropists The Environmental Defense Fund has done this to fill in some of the data gaps in beauty and personal care products, and philanthropy has supported research into plastics additives. State governments have also commissioned CHAs. This collaboration shows how diverse stakeholders, even those who may disagree on other policy issues, can come together in good faith to produce reliable data.

Change Chemistry: Can you give us an example of how this chemical data is collected and assessed at an industry level?

Bill: We’ve published three examples of industry-specific data sources in our 2024 report, Accelerating the Transition to Safer Chemistry: Establishing A Collective Vision & Impact Metrics. For each, a data source or sources were identified, chemical name and or CAS# were shared with ChemFORWARD for analysis against the shared data repository, a report was generated, and it was reviewed by their science team who generated key insights.    

I spoke earlier about the successes we’ve seen with the electronics and beauty and personal care industries. In another case example with the building materials industry, ChemFORWARD did an experiment analyzing Health Product Declarations for 7,200 products containing 82,000 disclosed substances and narrowed the dataset to an actionable 3,200 unique substances from 544 manufacturers. Of those, half had already been well-characterized, meaning they had already been given a green, yellow, orange, or red hazard designation. This case example illustrates that using shared data, chemical hazards are knowable, and the number of chemicals is manageable even in a complex industry sector.

These examples show how scalable our approach is; you can apply this level of analysis to a product, a company, an industry, or across different industries.

Change Chemistry: What role does chemical innovation play in this work?

Bill: It is foreseeable that in some functional uses, we may not be able to identify a pathway to available safer chemistry. In those cases, we believe the IMPACT FUND can play a role in identifying markets for innovation. The Fund can validate and amplify the market opportunity for innovation backed by data and industry partnerships to establish a rapid response network with bi-directional communications and connections to capital.

Change Chemistry: How does the IMPACT FUND  affect how advocacy groups help drive progress in safer chemistry?

Bill: We are at an inflection point in environmental health advocacy. Until now, most advocacy campaigns were focused on persuading brands to avoid using certain classes of chemicals. In light of several highly publicized examples of “regrettable substitutions,” advocacy groups are increasingly concerned not just about banning the bad stuff, but ensuring the adoption of verified, safer solutions. This brings the interests of brands and advocacy groups into alignment around good data. When advocacy groups have access to verified data, it cuts through the noise and allows them to have a more informed dialogue with companies.  

While we’re not involved in policymaking or lobbying, we focus on building collaboration around reliable data, even among groups with differing points of view. 

Change Chemistry: How do you address proprietary concerns and competition when it comes to safer chemical alternatives?

Bill: We believe chemical safety should be addressed as a pre-competitive issue—something that’s open to all companies for the benefit of society. For companies with proprietary concerns that prefer not to disclose specific ingredients, there’s a solution in ChemFORWARD called the SAFERProgram. In this program, companies can protect confidential information by working with third-party assessors under non-disclosure agreements. The output allows chemical identifiers and concentration ranges to be redacted while offering transparency on the hazards by displaying a green or yellow hazard band.This allows companies to verify the safety of their products while maintaining confidentiality. If someone is interested in a particular hazard profile, they can contact the company directly to discuss the ingredient’s functionality.

In a broken model, large companies that discover an alternative to something like phthalates might patent it, use it exclusively in their products, and market themselves as the only phthalate-free option. We’re advocating for a different approach. We suggest companies place their solution in the Safer Program. While the formula could still be patented, it would be accessible to everyone, and the company could generate revenue by licensing it. This collaborative model allows us to collectively phase out harmful chemicals over a set period because the safer alternative is available to all. It changes the incentive structure for the industry.

Change Chemistry: Is any part of the data collection or communication focused on the cost of chemicals or their safer alternatives?

Bill: Our main focus is on hazards. We're building a library of safer alternatives to provide a clear starting point for companies, helping them save time and money by avoiding dead ends. Actual costs to end users need to be evaluated on a case by case basis, which is beyond the scope of this fund.

Change Chemistry: For Change Chemistry member organizations, do you have a call to action?

Bill: Our call to action is to join us and contribute to accelerating science-based, data-driven efforts that meet the moment and set a course for using chemicals and chemistry in harmony with planetary boundaries and healthy life on earth. We are recruiting additional contributing partners to the IMPACT FUND who can help us scale the Data Trust and achieve the metrics we’ve established. We also encourage companies to engage with ChemFORWARD, and to form a cohort to tackle specific functional use problems and help characterize their industry. We want to collaboratively accelerate change in specific use cases. For chemical producers, we invite them to submit their safer alternatives into the Data Trust, even if they need to anonymize that information through ChemFORWARD’s SAFER program.