GOOD CHEMICAL MANAGEMENT
Hazardous chemicals deserve a red card. That’s why we consider chemical management holistically to protect consumers, workers and the environment from potential exposure.
COMING FULL CIRCLE
It all starts with using safe input chemistry. If hazardous chemicals do not even enter our factories, there’s no need to control them during the production process. As a result, they won’t be found in our products. And our suppliers win the advantage: They won’t have to work with expensive end of pipe solutions to clear water and air leaving the site.
RESTRICTED SUBSTANCE LIST (RSL)
PUMA wants our customers and athletes to be absolutely safe when wearing our products. This is non-negotiable. Since 1999, we have implemented a Restricted Substance List (RSL) to be able to assure this. This RSL lists potentially harmful chemicals used in our industry and specifies safe concentration limit values. Needless to say, those limits always take the most stringent global regulations into consideration. To cover all bases, we collaborate with the AFIRM industry working group and have adopted their RSL. Each year, external laboratories test thousands of materials against the AFIRM RSL, and only materials with a passing test report can be used in the production of our goods.
PROHIBITED SUBSTANCES
We classify chemicals defined as carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic or persistent and bio-accumulative for the environment as priority hazardous chemicals. These chemicals are banned from use in the manufacturing of our products. To keep track of these chemicals, we document them in a Manufacturing Restricted Substances List, or MRSL. We use the MRSL of the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals Foundation (ZDHC), an organization we helped to create.
THE GREENPEACE DETOX CAMPAIGN
As the first company to sign a Greenpeace Detox commitment, PUMA manifested its support for the precautionary principle, the elimination of hazardous chemicals and transparency in the supply chain in 2011. This commitment has remained unchanged until today and we will continuously report on our progress against our set targets.