Bureau Veritas Launches Environmental Emission Tool For Textile Industry

Hong Kong /PRNewswire/ - Pro-active Approach Drives Faster & Greener Supply Chain

Bureau Veritas has announced that it has launched an IT platform, BVE3, to support its Chemical Discharge Monitoring business. BVE3, Bureau Veritas' Environmental Emission Evaluator, is a supplementary tool to support supply chain partners in reducing the environmental impacts through the provision of a mechanism to understand factories' daily and weekly discharge potentials. This avoids the sole reliance on one time screening of materials, chemicals and discharge.

BVE3 works in combination with other traditional supply chain controls (chemicals screening, testing and factory audits) for greater visibility on ongoing compliance to the priority chemicals. The risk matrix approach allows clients to choose and use these tools in a most cost effective way. For industries with wet processing, BVE3 assists in constructing realistic discharge scenarios for the hazardous substances (auxiliary chemicals, dyes, etc.) that are used along the manufacturing process and released to the environment (waste water discharge) from the factories.

In support of supply chain chemical management performance and transparency, factories upload chemical information to BVE3 on a monthly basis. From there, Bureau Veritas' specialists analyze factories' inputs and the calculated output results in the estimated concentration and amount of hazardous substances in water discharge. The number and the amount of hazardous substances in the chemical inventory and discharge create 3 indexes to help measuring factories' chemical management performance:

"In response to issues associated with chemical management performance and transparency within the textile supply chain, we developed our BVE3 web platform. BVE3 enables retailers and brands to identify their factories chemical management performance and where to utilize the sustainability resources." said Mr. Niraj Singh, Bureau Veritas' Technical Lead for Chemical Discharge Monitoring. "Critically, the better the factory performs and greater the transparency; the frequency and intensity of emission / chemical sample testing and environmental audits reduces."

Ms. Sheila Shek, Global Environmental Supply Chain Responsible at H&M added, "BVE3complements our testing and auditing program providing us with far greater insight into our supply chain's chemical management performance. In turn, this allows us to better focus resources to drive a greener supply chain. We have been partnering with Bureau Veritas on this for several months now and I am really pleased to see this innovative and pro-active chemical management approach being commercially available to all sustainable players. At H&M, we believe BVE3 is a key milestone in transforming the textile industry by switching from a reactive to proactive approach".

Dr. Kaimin Shih, Associate Professor, The University of Hong Kong and Associate Editor, Waste Management (Elsevier) further stated, "BVE3 is the only commercial model available that can systematically estimate the discharge scenarios of multiple pollutants for the textile processing industry and provides a very economical way to estimate the discharge scenarios."

About Bureau Veritas
Bureau Veritas is a global leader in testing, inspection and certification services. Founded in 1828, the group has more than 66,000 employees in 1,400 offices and laboratories around the globe. Bureau Veritas helps its clients to improve their performances by offering innovative services and solutions in order to ensure that their products, infrastructure and processes meet standards and regulations in terms of quality, health and safety, environment protection and social responsibility.

Website: www.bureauveritas.com

Bureau Veritas' Consumer Products Services Division is a leading global quality assurance provider for the global consumer product and retail markets. It offers an array of specialized services including testing, inspections, certification, audits and engineering services for a wide range of consumer products. These products include soft goods; electrical and electronic products; smartworld products and services including wireless and mobile devices; automotive equipment; hard goods; toys and juvenile products; premiums; food products as well as health, beauty, cosmetics, and household products.

Website: www.bureauveritas.com/cps