10 Spray June 2016 Pressure Points Doug Fratz CSPA Aerosol Products Division Staff executive CSPA Consumer Product Ingredients Dictionary: New & Improved Later this year, there will be an exciting change in the format of the CSPA Consumer Product Ingredients Dictionary. The Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) will convert the existing dictionary into an interactive webbased database that will greatly enhance its utility as an essential and unique tool for formulators and marketers of aerosols and other consumer specialty products. The CSPA Dictionary was initiated in 2009 to support the association’s voluntary ingredient communication initiative, and was modeled after the International Nomenclature for Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI) Dictionary that has provided the ingredient labeling nomenclature for decades for that product sector in the U.S. and throughout the world. Our initial goal was to do the same for the household, automotive and institutional-use consumer specialty products that CSPA represents. We retained the Personal Care Products Council (PCPC), which developed and maintains INCI, to help us develop our dictionary. As we began to build the CSPA Dictionary, we realized that it could serve many more purposes in addition to providing standardized nomenclature for transparently communicating product ingredients to the public. The most important function would be to serve as a technical reference for formulators and marketers seeking to create new products and to assure their regulatory compliance. There are no other technical references that specifically apply to the ingredients we use in our products. During the past seven years, we have continuously enhanced the types of information included for each ingredient. Now the dictionary contains information addressing the following questions: • Which ingredient suppliers make the ingredient and under what trade names? • What other names and numbers are applied to the ingredient in commerce and need to be considered in finding health and safety information? • What are the functions an ingredient serves in products? The ingredient is used to formulate what types of products? • What regulations and standards cite that ingredient? • What is the consumer product volatile organic compound (VOC) status? • Is it allowed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Safer Choice Program or in Federal Insecticide, Fungicide & Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) 25(b) products? Formulators of new products and marketers of current products need to know these types of information. Building a dictionary to assemble all of this information has been a laborious process. When we issued the Third Edition of the CSPA Consumer Product Ingredients Dictionary in November 2015, it contained 700 ingredient monographs, each with a CSPA Name preferred for ingredient communication. However, those monographs also defined more than 2,700 technical and other names, and over 1,000 trade names for those ingredients used by 55 suppliers. With added appendices of definitions of technical terms and other information, the Third Edition contains more than 700 pages of fully searchable technical information. Many thousands of hours of work by CSPA staff and sponsoring member companies have gone into developing all of this information; many thousands more will be needed to assure that all of the ingredients used in our broad spectrum of products are covered. Early this year, we began to try to conceive how to make the massive amounts of information in the dictionary more accessible. Although all of its files are searchable, the dictionary is a compilation of text documents and the process of downloading them can be slow (only those of us of a certain age still page through Webster’s Dictionaries to find the words we want). We eventually realized that the best format for our dictionary was not linked PDF files, but a userfriendly database that can be accessed directly by users via the Internet. The best aspect of the new format is that it will more easily meet our goal of transparently providing access to basic ingredient information free to the public, while allowing industry subscribers full access to all of the information in the database. This is critical to assuring full transparency in ingredient communication using CSPA Names. EPA’s Safer Choice Program and Walmart’s Policy for Sustainable Chemistry in Consumables both cite the CSPA Dictionary for nomenclature. I’ll let you know about progress on this project in future columns. Meanwhile, if your company would like to provide input for the dictionary, please contact me at dfratz@cspa.org. Spray
Spray June 2016
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