Acquisition of “Green” products and munitions—Automated assessments

Executive Orders 13101 and 13148 established the federal priorities to improve the use of environmentally preferable (”green”) products, including munitions, and prevent or reduce pollution at its source. Quantitative criteria for “green” chemicals and products have not been previously defined. Acquisition personnel, manufacturers, and regulatory agencies have heretofore been restricted to qualitative and generic, intuitive considerations (e.g., “less harmful to human health and the environment”). We have overcome this deficiency by compiling and/or integrating more than 75 million data elements for over 210,000 chemicals and 350,000 chemical and munition products over the past 22 years and synthesizing these data into quantitative “green” chemical and product ratings with our “Green” Products Compliance Analytical System (GP-CAS) and our “Green” Munitions Analytical Compliance System (G-MACS). G-MACS also uses the Munitions Items Disposition Action System (MIDAS) munitions constituent database from the U.S. Army Defense Ammunition Center as the “core” reference resource. GP-CAS and G-MACS are both based upon 47 chemical “green” criteria, each normalized on a scale of 0 percent (worst “green”) to 100 percent (best “green”). These criteria encompass ecological (airwater-soil), health (acute-chronic), and safety (fire-reactive) hazards. In addi- tion, these systems both identify which of 57 state, federal, or international regulatory lists include any chemical constituent of a product. The only difference between GP-CAS and G-MACS is the product constituent reference database source—chemicals or munition products. “Green” analyses can be completed in 5–30 seconds, depending upon the complexity of the product or munition. Hierarchical “green” assessments are performed at the chemical, part, or product levels, and “green” ratings are calculated for the holistic “greenness” of the entire product, the separate ecological/health/safety scores, each of their subcategory scores, and the individual 47 endpoints for each chemical. These assessments, therefore, not only provide a quantitative “green” rating for a chemical/munition product within a few seconds, but also quantitatively identify the type of compromising hazard(s) and the contributing hazardous chemical constituent(s) within the product. These Web-based systems can be utilized for any type of product analyses in any industry, facility, or location, since analyses are chemical-based, not product-specific. GP-CAS and G-MACS fulfill the objectives of Executives Orders 13101 and 13148 to accurately identify environmentally preferable products and prevent pollution at the source. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.