P&G's Product Safety Policy and Practices "Our products will be safe for humans and the environment when used as intended." (From: Procter & Gamble "Values and Policies" Statement).   Implementation Procter & Gamble ensures the safety of our products, packages and operations for our employees, consumers and the environment. We consider this to be a requirement for conducting responsible business, and an essential element of building and maintaining public trust in our products. We carefully evaluate the safety of our products and ingredients before they go to market, using well-established risk assessment methods to understand both hazards and potential exposures. These risk evaluations are a mandatory part of the company's product development process, and begin during the early stages of a product's design. The same safety standards are used everywhere we sell or make products. In situations where there is reasonable scientific evidence that our use of an ingredient in a particular product could be unsafe for people or the environment, or where we believe there is significant scientific uncertainty about its safety, we do not proceed with that use. We either find a safe and technically/economically viable alternative, take actions to reduce proposed exposures for people and the environment to safe levels, or do additional work to reduce uncertainty until we are confident that the ingredient and product are safe. As a part of the product clearance process, safety evaluations are formally documented and approved by our safety managers prior to market. They are reviewed and updated whenever our products change in ways that might change the earlier safety evaluation, or if we learn new information about an ingredient's characteristics (for example, new research about its hazards or exposures). Beyond establishing the safety of our products, P&G complies with applicable legal requirements in its markets around the world. As appropriate during the product design process, we also use tools such as lifecycle analysis to help us understand and manage a product's overall environmental burdens and natural resources use. As described above, the ingredients in Procter & Gamble's products are evaluated using risk assessment to ensure they are safe. As part of this process, we recognize that there are materials whose chemical properties require especially in-depth study and research. This includes chemicals that are broadly recognized as priority substances by the international scientific community and government authorities based on their persistence, potential to bioaccumulate, and toxicity (including those that are known in humans as carcinogens or mutagens). We avoid using such chemicals as ingredients in our products, unless we are confident that we can conduct a sufficiently thorough risk assessment to ensure that their use is safe for humans and the environment. Another key element of our safety program is external communications - sharing scientifically sound, relevant, and meaningful information with key stakeholders (especially regulatory authorities, employees, communities, and consumers), and seeking input from outside the company. Where relevant and appropriate, we share information about the ingredients we use, key aspects of our safety evaluations, and various environmental characteristics of products. Most recently, we have begun to expand these activities using the Internet (for example, see "Science in the Box" and "Science of Beauty"). We often seek independent review of our safety methods and evaluations, and the company has a long history of publishing the results of its safety work in the scientific literature. We stay in touch with consumers via our consumer relations centers around the world, so that we can improve the quality of our safety evaluations, and the information we provide about our products. Finally, we regularly engage in dialogue with policymakers, scientists, investors, and public interest groups, to understand questions they may have about the safety of our products, and to build positive working relationships (for example, in the development of public policies regarding chemicals management).   References and Further Readings Cowan, C.E.; Versteeg, D.J.; Larson, R.J.; Kloepper-Sams, P.J., 1995. Integrated approach for environmental assessment of new and existing chemicals. Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, 21(1)3-31. Feijtel, T.C.J and C. Lally, 1995. Components of Human and Ecological Risk Assessment. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment, 5:470-477. Five Winds International, 2003. Environmental Risk Assessment at Procter & Gamble - A Case Study. Download PDF  put in File Basket. Vandepitte, V., T.C.J. Feijtel, 2000. Risk Assessment: A Case Study on Surfactants. Tenside-Surfactants-Detergents, 37:35-40.   Current Poll Contact Link