A Primer on Product Stewardship Audits

A product stewardship audit goes beyond your facility or immediate environment and looks at the life-cycle impact of your product. “Not only do you want to be compliant with regulations so your facility can operate, you should be concerned with the compliance requirements of the places you sell,” says Maryann Sanders, senior regulatory compliance specialist at Haley & Aldrich.

To sell outside the U.S., for instance, means learning country-specific requirements and auditing against those requirements to ensure compliance.

Industrial hygienists and the broader Environmental Health and Safety community already rely on audits to manage complex processes, to ensure worker safety, and to avoid unnecessary fines, but they aren’t always familiar with product stewardship audits.

To remedy that, Sanders is leading a webinar through the Product Stewardship Society on Jan. 31.

“Eliminate Non-Compliance Fines with Product Stewardship Auditing” will introduce you to the main aspects of a product stewardship audit, including key regulations to know, common audit protocols, and the consequences for not auditing your products.

Sanders will offer examples of the good, bad and ugly in her overview. In one instance, a company was told to stop selling its product due to improperly labeled packaging. “The company was fined and their distributor was upset, because the product comes off the shelves. They can’t sell it.” A audit not only discovers the problem but establishes a process so that situation never happens again.