How Apparel and Footwear Can Comply with Changing Chemical Regulation under President-elect Trump

▤ Summary

While experts say its hard to predict with absolute certainty, the Lautenberg Act stands a good probability of surviving regime change, especially since — unlike many regulatory laws — many businesses had supported it in its final form. "The Lautenberg Act had so much bipartisan support on both sides, and while it wasnt a perfect law, everybody got some of what they wanted," says Danielle Iverson, director of government relations at the AAFA. Consumers want to know their clothes are safe, and theyre increasingly savvy and concerned about chemicals in their everyday lives, especially when it concerns items that regularly come into contact with their bodies.In the face of so much uncertainty, perhaps the best strategy is to develop a very flexible, automated strategy for compliance so that when the dust settles and its clear what the new rules will be, change is much easier.A flexible, software-based approach not only helps companies comply with the Lautenberg Act revisions to TSCA — or any compliance directives, for that matter. It also helps with the heavy tracking and documentation demands that are always placed on apparel and footwear supply chains that now span more countries, suppliers, laws and trading partners than ever before.The problem can be quite daunting. And with complex global supply chains, the fashion industry needs to track and manage the compliance of all of the companies, products and inputs in its supply chain.The only feasible way for most big-name apparel makers and retailers to achieve that transparency reliably is to automate as much as they can, so their people can "manage by exception"—without incurring so many extra costs that compliance becomes a huge component of the cost of goods sold.Using automated rules-based systems, its fairly easy to reflect these updates, manage to federal and state laws, and verify that different items made by different manufacturers all meet these changing regulatory limits.Also, when a system is flexible and automated, changes in regulatory regime — like the recent sudden shift in government — become much easier to deal with, even in times of great uncertainty.

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