HEJSupport, the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC) and groundWork South Africa are happy to announce a new report examining a fundamental gap in chemicals and product policy: we often do not know which chemicals are present in the materials and products we manufacture, purchase, reuse and recycle.
The report, Knowing What Chemicals Are in Products, explains why chemical transparency and traceability are essential for protecting health and the environment. Disclosing chemical information is key, but it is not enough if that information becomes disconnected from individual materials, components, and products as they move through global value chains and into reuse, recycling, and waste streams.
The publication further explains the concept of a Globally Minimum Transparency Standard (GMTS) as a global benchmark for disclosing the identities of chemicals of concern in materials and products. Combined with Digital Product Passports and other emerging digital product information systems, this approach ensures that chemical information follows products throughout their life cycle, helping stakeholders make informed decisions.
This is especially urgent for plastics. More than 16,000 chemicals are associated with plastics, including thousands identified as chemicals of concern. Without reliable information on their chemical composition, recycling can perpetuate hazardous substances in secondary materials—creating toxic circularity rather than a safe circular economy.
The report therefore calls for advancing chemical transparency and traceability across the Global Plastics Treaty, the Global Framework on Chemicals, the Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Minamata Conventions, and emerging initiatives on Digital Product Passports and Digital Product Information Systems.
The report conveys a central message:
Knowing what chemicals are in products—and ensuring that this information follows products throughout their life cycle—must become a fundamental part of global chemicals and product governance.
Read the full report: Knowing What Chemicals Are in Products – Why transparency and traceability of chemicals are essential for product safety, circularity and the right to know
