Product Safety
The first-class quality of Henkel’s products means more than convenience and high product performance. It includes all-encompassing product safety and ecological compatibility. Customers and consumers can be certain that Henkel products and technologies are safe when used as intended and have been thoroughly tested to ensure their compatibility with health and the environment. The potential risks of new products are systematically analysed early, during research and development.
Product safety: Implementation at Henkel
To begin with, our experts investigate whether the product’s ingredients could pose a hazard to people or the environment. They then determine the extent to which people and the environment are exposed to the substance. This is because, in most cases, harmful effects do not occur unless a substance is present in a certain quantity and concentration. Only when the results of the two assessment steps are put together in an overall risk assessment is it possible to state whether a product can be used safely. The formulated product is also subjected to an assessment in which the properties of its individual ingredients, their concentration in the product, and the conditions of use of the product are judged.
The use of substances with certain hazardous properties is absolutely prohibited from the outset for some applications. For example, substances with proven carcinogenic, teratogenic or mutagenic properties may not be used in consumer products. Other substances are subject to strict conditions and constraints imposed by Henkel itself.
Continuous Monitoring
Product developers and product safety experts monitor Henkel’s products continuously in the market for the purpose of accumulating experience to be fed into the assessments, and to ensure that the products on the market are safe. New scientific insights, unexpected impurities in raw materials, or other production-related problems may necessitate a renewed product assessment or modifications to the precautionary and protective measures
Development of alternatives to animal testing
Henkel places a high priority on developing test methods that do not involve the use of animals, and making these methods generally available. We have been working on the development of alternatives to animal testing since the 1980s. For this purpose, we engage in collaborative projects in an international network comprising external partners from industry, regulatory authorities, and research establishments. We are developing new alternative test methods with the help of our full thickness skin model, which involves no animal testing. We use this full thickness skin model to assure the performance and quality of our finished products, e.g. to test the compatibility of our cosmetics products. One result of the use of the non-animal in-vitro tests (tests carried out in a test tube) developed so far has been the inclusion of a range of new cell and tissue culture systems in laboratory practice.
