Bureau Veritas launches emission tool for textile industry

Testing, inspection and certification company Bureau Veritas has launched BVE3—Bureau Veritas' Environmental Emission Evaluator—an IT platform to support its Chemical Discharge Monitoring business.

As a supplementary tool, BVE3 supports 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, the company said.

BVE3 works in combination with other traditional supply chain controls, such as 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 analyse 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.

“BVE3 enables retailers and brands to identify their factories chemical management performance and where to utilise the sustainability resources,” said 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,” he explains.

“BVE3 complements our testing and auditing programme 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,” said Sheila Shek, global environmental supply chain responsible at H&M.