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This guidance is primarily aimed at public procurers involved in a range of contracting agreements related to building materials and products. This includes the purchase of building materials for construction works, but may also extend to material extraction, manufacturing, building, retrofit, refurbishment, design, interior fit out, and end-of-life demolition or deconstruction processes. There are a variety of roles within the procurement cycle that the guidance can support, from commissioning, category management, tender preparation and evaluation, to contract management.

This document summarises lessons learned from the various project activities in three sectors: electrical and electronic equipment (EEE); building and construction; and toys. It also formulates key messages addressed to different stakeholder groups and provides links to guidance and tools developed under the GEF project

This study, commissioned by DG Environment for the European Commission and produced by Wood and Ramboll.  The objective was to assess the use of PFASs and fluorine-free alternatives in textiles, upholstry, carpets, leather and apparel, including specific focus on volumes of use, technical function, and emissions.

Non-fluorine alternatives considered were hydrocarbons, silicones, dendrimers, polyurethane, nanomaterials, and alternative technologies.  The study makes recommendations for policy, including a REACH restriction on the placing on the market and use of these products that contain any PFAS, and a listing under the Stockholm Convention.  It is also recommended in the report that a restriction could be combined with voluntary industry measures and provisions in public procurement to encourage substitution of PFAS before mandatory legislation is introduced.

This guidance addresses the role that sustainable procurement can play in managing chemicals of concern in electronic and electrical equipment procured across the public sector, during their entire lifecycle. It is primarily addressed to public procurers as well as those responsible for the procurement of waste management solutions at end-of-life for electronics equipment.

This guidance is aimed at helping procurement practitioners implement policies on chemicals management through sustainable procurement approaches and tools such as market dialogue, criteria and ecolabels.

In this report, we present a list of Chemicals of Concern (CoCs) in plastic toys, with supporting information on the applied selection criteria. To identify the CoCs, we started from a literature review of available plastic toys compositions studies, and obtained the chemical mass fraction in plastic toy as well as the chemical functions. The chemical emissions from the plastic toys and subsequent human exposures were then estimated using a series of models and the coupled nearfield and far-field exposure assessment framework. Finally, the human exposure doses were compared to toxicity measures such as the reference dose (RfD), or median effective dose (ED50) for cancer effects, to evaluate the health risks on children. Chemical-material combinations that have a hazard quotient (HQ) > 10, a margin of exposure (MoE) < 100, or a lifetime cancer risk > 10-6 were included in the list of CoCs. In total, 35 (less than 10%) of all chemical-material combinations studied were identified as CoCs. The results indicate that a relevant amount of chemicals used in plastic toys may pose a non-negligible health risk to children, calling for more refined investigations and more human- and eco-friendly alternatives.

This document has been developed within the framework of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) project ID: 9771 on Global Best Practices on Emerging Chemical Policy Issues of Concern under the Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM). This project is funded by the GEF, implemented by UNEP and executed by the SAICM Secretariat.