The Client

Kingfisher plc, an international home improvement company with 1,280 stores in 10 countries across Europe, Russia and Turkey, has a clear purpose – to create good homes by making home improvement accessible for everyone. Kingfisher’s sustainable growth plan is designed to achieve this by embedding sustainability in all their products and services. The plan prioritises the issues that matter most to customers and aims to maximise Kingfisher’s positive impact on their homes and lives.

One of Kingfishers's big goals is to help the 6 million customers they serve every week to create healthier homes and connect with nature. Therefore, it is vital that they not only remain compliant, but also work towards reducing chemical exposure across all their operating companies.

Yordas offers tailored services to our clients' unique supply chain complexity and market sector. Working closely with our clients, we can deliver chemicals policies and management systems that are fit for purpose and work for any type and size of business.

Short and Focussed Chemicals Action List required for Operating Companies

As part of its sustainable growth plan Kingfisher wishes to take a proactive stance on concerns associated with the use of chemicals in its products, and therefore extend its chemicals policy to not only meet all the required regulatory standards, but also to reduce exposure to chemicals it considers to be of greater concern to its customers, the factories making its products, its people and to the wider environment.

To meet this sustainable growth plan goal, Kingfisher authored a Chemicals Action List (CAL) within which a list of chemicals of concern were identified. This has been used to create product specifications where restrictions apply within its Group QA function and are applied to products managed within its Group purchasing teams that source products for its trading brands. Experience of using the previous CAL had shown that it could be most effective and easiest to implement by QA personnel in the Operating Companies if the list was short and focussed, by taking into account the likelihood of chemicals of concern being found in product inventories.

With Yordas Hive you receive exactly what you need, precisely when you need it – allowing you to focus on what you do best.

Early Warning System allows Kingfisher to develop Regulatory Roadmap

To assist Kingfisher in implementing its chemicals strategy, Yordas Group created a new CAL to ensure the list of chemicals was complete and up-to-date. In order to develop the knowledge base relating to Kingfisher’s chemicals of concern, Yordas Group mapped each substance in the CAL against the following parameters:

• Level of regulation (e.g. if the substance use is either prohibited/restricted, declarable, or proposed)
• Scope of regulatory requirement (e.g. if the substance is regulated in substances / mixtures, articles or both)
• Regulated product type (e.g. toys, textiles, all consumer articles)
• Relevance for Kingfisher products (using Yordas Hive’s substance use and application information, Yordas Group identified whether a substance was relevant or not to kingfisher, based on the likelihood of a substance being found in their product inventories)

For ease of use and transparency, the CAL was organised into a Black List of prohibited and restricted substances, a Grey List of declarable and controlled substances and Watch List of substances either proposed for regulation or with a suspected or known hazard concern. A new Chemicals of Concern (COC) list was created from the Watch List by screening each substance entry against a set of priority criteria agreed with Kingfisher, using the information in Yordas Hive’s Substance Database.

The COC list contains substances prioritised for future regulatory action and provides an effective horizon scanning tool for identifying substances that represent a potential hazard to human and environmental health and which could potentially be taken down a risk management route.

This early warning system allows Kingfisher to develop a regulatory roadmap and anticipate future regulatory action with a view to safeguarding their future business, as well as meet its strong commitment to protect human health and the environment beyond the legal requirements of regulatory compliance.

For further information or to try Hive for yourself, please contact our expert team:

Yordas Hive
+44(0)1524 594
sales@yordasgroup.com
yordasgroup.com/hive