Material Transition · Glossary

The words this industry uses, defined plainly.

Plain definitions for the materials, compliance and supply-chain terms that keep coming up: the atom economy, regrettable substitution, EPR, PFAS, the REACH candidate list, and the rest.

The atom economy

The atom economy is the part of the economy made of physical matter — the materials, components and finished goods that are mined, grown, refined, formed and eventually discarded, as distinct from the services and software layered on top of them.

The term is used here to name the thing that has no data layer. Financial markets, advertising and logistics each have one. The physical economy is still coordinated largely by PDFs, spec sheets and phone calls, which is why questions as basic as "what is this product made of, and where did it come from" are usually research projects rather than lookups.

Regrettable substitution

Also called regrettable substitute

Regrettable substitution is replacing a restricted chemical with an alternative that turns out to carry the same hazard, or a similar one, and later attracts the same restriction.

The canonical example is bisphenol A and bisphenol S. Much of the industry moved from BPA to BPS under pressure; both now sit on the ECHA candidate list and the California Proposition 65 list with the same status and the same jurisdictional spread. The pattern repeats across phthalates and glycol ether solvents. Substitution made without exposure data does not remove risk — it moves it, and buys a few years.

Extended producer responsibility (EPR)

Also called EPR · producer responsibility

Extended producer responsibility is a policy approach that makes the producer of a product financially responsible for its end-of-life management, typically by paying fees into a system that funds collection and recycling.

For packaging in the United States, the producer is generally the brand owner rather than the converter or retailer, and fees are usually modulated by material and recyclability — so what a package is made of directly changes what it costs. That makes EPR a materials-data problem rather than a waste problem.

Producer responsibility organisation (PRO)

Also called PRO

A producer responsibility organisation is the body that collects fees from producers and runs the collection and recycling system an extended producer responsibility programme funds.

In the United States, Circular Action Alliance is the approved PRO in California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota and Maryland. Joining one is typically a legal precondition for selling into an obligated state, separate from and earlier than paying fees.

Restricted substances list (RSL)

Also called RSL

A restricted substances list is a published set of chemicals that a jurisdiction, an industry body, or an individual company restricts, bans, or requires disclosure of in products.

The word "restricted" hides a wide range. A substance may be banned outright, phased out on a schedule, permitted only below a threshold, or merely subject to disclosure — and the same substance often sits at different levels in different jurisdictions. A single "flagged / not flagged" answer is almost always too coarse to act on.

REACH candidate list

Also called SVHC list · candidate list of substances of very high concern

The REACH candidate list is the European Chemicals Agency register of substances of very high concern, and inclusion triggers disclosure duties for articles containing the substance above 0.1% by weight.

The candidate list is not the authorisation list. Candidate-list inclusion creates communication and notification duties; the authorisation list (Annex XIV) is what actually forbids use without a specific authorisation. Substances typically move from one to the other, so candidate-list status is best read as advance warning rather than as a restriction.

Intentionally added

A substance is intentionally added when it is put into a product to serve a function, as opposed to being present as an impurity or from contamination.

The distinction carries most of the reporting burden in state PFAS law, including Minnesota's Amara's Law. It cannot be inferred from a technical data sheet or a safety data sheet — only the party who formulated the material knows whether a substance is doing a job. In practice that makes it a supplier question, and getting it answered in writing is usually the slowest step in a filing.

PFAS

Also called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances · forever chemicals

PFAS are per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of synthetic chemicals built around carbon-fluorine bonds, used for water, grease and stain resistance and valued for a chemical stability that also makes them persistent in the environment.

The class runs to roughly 15,000 substances, which is why substance-level screening and class-level regulation give different answers. A material can return clean against lists that name individual substances and still be squarely in scope for a state statute that regulates PFAS as a class. Absence of a flag means not yet identified, never cleared.

Bill of materials (BOM)

Also called BOM

A bill of materials is the structured list of components and raw materials that make up a product, usually with quantities and often with supplier and part identifiers.

Most BOMs stop one level above where compliance questions start. A packaging BOM that lists "carton" rather than the board, coating, ink, adhesive and window film cannot answer an EPR recyclability question or a PFAS reporting question. Extending the tree by one level is often the single highest-leverage piece of data work a compliance programme does.

Supply chain mapping

Supply chain mapping is tracing the path a material takes from its origin through each processing and manufacturing step to a finished product, and recording the companies and facilities at each step.

Most maps stop at tier one, the suppliers a company buys from directly, because that is who it has a contract with. The risks that matter — a single-source smelter, a restricted substance introduced three tiers down, a facility in a jurisdiction that just changed its rules — usually sit deeper than that.

Scope 3 emissions

Scope 3 emissions are the greenhouse gas emissions in a company's value chain that it does not own or control — including those from purchased goods and services, transport, and the use and disposal of the products it sells.

For most manufacturers and brand owners, Scope 3 is the overwhelming majority of the total and purchased goods are the largest part of it. That makes it a materials and supplier question before it is an energy question, and it is why Scope 3 accounting and supply chain mapping keep turning out to need the same underlying data.

Post-consumer recycled content (PCR)

Also called PCR

Post-consumer recycled content is material recovered from products that reached an end user and were discarded, as distinct from pre-consumer or post-industrial material recovered from manufacturing scrap.

The distinction is not pedantry. Most regulatory and fee-modulation credit applies to post-consumer content specifically, because post-industrial scrap was largely being recycled already and diverting it changes little. A supplier claim of "recycled content" that does not say which kind is not an answer to the question a filing asks.