About this Research Topic

Background

Chemicals are the main building blocks of today’s consumer product portfolio and fulfill various performance functions in materials and products. It was estimated that ~30,000 – 80,000 different market-relevant chemicals are commonly used in thousands of different consumer products, but a recent review covering chemical inventories from 19 countries and regions suggests that 350,000 chemicals and mixtures of chemicals have been registered for production and use, with substantial differences across countries/regions. In addition to intentionally added chemicals that fulfill certain performance functions, materials and articles may also contain unintended chemical contaminants. It is found that consumer products serve as an important source of human exposure to chemicals, since humans are in close proximity with those chemicals during the use of consumer products, leading to significant impacts on human health. Chemicals in consumer products can also have adverse impacts on the environment and wildlife during manufacturing and disposal processes. This calls for more sustainable chemical ingredients in consumer products that have a lower impact on both the environment and human health.
Research on improving the sustainability of chemicals in consumer products initially focus on the production stage but is being expanded to encompass the use and end-of-life stages. Detailed life cycle inventories have been developed for certain chemical ingredients. Besides environmental impacts such as GHG emission and ecotoxicity, impacts of chemicals on human health during the use of consumer products have gained increasing attention, as studies demonstrate that product use-related exposure may exceed environmentally mediated exposures and is therefore essential to consider when evaluating the sustainability over the entire life cycle of consumer products. Modeling frameworks have been developed to assess the environmental and human health impacts of the chemicals through the consumer product life cycle, and specific models have been developed to estimate the chemical emissions and human exposures for various types of consumer products. Based on this, a life cycle based alternatives assessment approach has been proposed to comprehensively assess the sustainability of chemical ingredients in consumer products for chemical substitution. High-throughput screenings have been performed on several types of consumer products which identified significant number of chemicals of concern. Studies also found evidence of hazardous chemicals in consumer products originating from recycled materials, highlighting recycling as a potential source of chemical contamination.

The goal of this Research Topic is to provide an overarching picture of the sustainability of chemical ingredients in consumer products through the product life cycle. By covering state-of-the-art research trends on the different aspects of chemicals, this Research Topic aims to promote life cycle consideration of chemical sustainability, leading to better chemical ingredients in consumer products that mitigate the impacts on both the environment and the consumers.

In this Research Topic, we welcome the submission of a wide range of article types related to the sustainability of chemicals in consumer products along the different life cycle stages of consumer products. We focus on three core topics as follows, and we provide example specific subjects for each core topic. Submissions that cover other specific subjects are also welcome.

Core topic 1: Assessment of sustainability of chemicals through the consumer products' supply chain
• How to assess worker exposure to chemicals and the health impacts during consumer product manufacturing in a comparative context?
• How to address missing data on supply chain emissions for chemicals and consumer products?
• How to define safe and sustainable by design criteria for chemicals in consumer products?

Core topic 2: Assessment of sustainability of chemicals during the use stage of consumer products
• How can biomonitoring/PBPK modeling support the sustainability assessment of chemicals in consumer products?
• How to address emissions, fate and consumer exposures for emerging organic chemicals (e.g. PFASs), ionizable compounds, and metal-based compounds?
• How to assess understudied product types (e.g. electronics, appliances incl. residues on dishes/clothing, and solvent-based products) and exposure pathways (e.g. dermal exposure)?
• How to back-calculate safe doses from bioactivity of chemicals?
• How to choose physicochemical properties from different sources to be used in models?
• The role of indoor dust in affecting chemical release, fate and consumer exposure, and the methods for modeling dust.
• Methods for addressing missing info on chemical ingredients, their functions and mass fractions in consumer products.
• For the overall sustainability assessment of chemicals in consumer products, how shall we weigh impacts to the consumers, manufacturing workers, general population, environment, and ecosystem?

Core topic 3: Assessment of sustainability of chemicals during the recycling of consumer products
• Indicators/criteria for recyclability of chemicals in consumer products.
• Substitution of harmful additives in consumer products in support of a circular economy.

Keywords: Sustainability, Consumer products, Chemicals, Organics, Inorganics, Life cycle impact assessment, Manufacturing, Product use, Recycling.

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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