The leading safety brand is redefining chemical best practices

There is probably not a more recognizable brand in the world when it comes to safety and helping people in general than the Red Cross. And in its American branch, founded in 1881, the Red Cross also stands as a national role model for how to standardize business practices.

For instance, it was a request by the American Red Cross for a national blood policy in 1972 that inspired the U.S. government to establish a program two years later to support standardized practices and end paid blood donations.

This rich history of standardizing safety makes one of the latest American Red Cross programs seem perfectly logical: the standardization of choosing and approving less-toxic MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) chemicals for the organization’s far-flung U.S. operations in some 36 regions.

“Standardization is part and parcel of what we do,” says Dee Cozart, Senior Director of the American Red Cross Corporate Safety Office in Washington, D.C. “Now we are simply transferring that reputation for self discipline toward looking at it from the toxicity level of our chemical inventory.”

According to Cozart, Red Cross started considering a deeper look into its chemical inventories in October last year. By January, her organization started to come up with a standardization plan. In April, the American Red Cross bio-medical executive leadership gave the green light for a complete chemical analysis of inventories across the broad range of “use categories,” Cozart says. She adds it will take about 10 months to complete the inventory of all chemicals in all the use categories that the organization has and to reduce that list to appropriate choices for each category.

“We have hundreds of use categories for MRO chemicals,” Cozart says. “This effort is going to have to involve our representatives in the field and departments at corporate headquarters. We’ve got a lot of regions of the American Red Cross. Therefore, the level of discipline it takes to make a program work across that broad a landscape will take some time. Yet we are committed to the program. At the Red Cross, we want to be responsible corporate citizens, and if we can reduce our toxic footprint around chemicals we want to do that. We are committed to rolling it out through the staff and the volunteers.”

As Cozart explains, it is inevitable for any large organization to have a certain percentage of chemical acquisitions occur below purchasing department radar. “We did a truly accurate electronic reading of our chemical inventories and matched those to use categories using a third-party vendor’s chemical management software. We found that we have as many as 181 products, those are separate SKUs, for the same use category. We’ll work through and update our inventory list, and reduce the number of choices of chemicals for each category. Our goal is to cut the number of choices to five, 10 or 15 good products per category,” Cozart said. “We are looking to reduce the overall toxicity in each category, reduce the costs, but also make sure the chemicals still have efficacy. We want to assure our people across the country that these approved chemicals are available, and that they are of comparable quality to what people are used to using. And, of course, we want to make sure that each chemical really works.”

Cozart says that when the program is fully implemented it will touch some 19,000 paid staff and 200,000 volunteers. In order to implement a program of such scope, she says it is critical that the American Red Cross takes the time to appraise the chemicals properly, qualify its vendors and ensure the organization has “good contacts” in place.

“We’ll complete about 10 use categories this year,” explains the safety director. “And I think we might realize 10 percent savings this year, doing about 10 percent of our inventory. With MRO chemicals, there’s a turnover of most chemicals three or four times a year,” Cozart adds. “So, the savings might be 30 to 40 percent the next year. But I don’t want to make cost-savings the big issue. We are going to make best practices the issue. It’s about how we want to do business. That’s real efficiency. It’s about how we conduct the business of safety.”

Three key goals for the American Red Cross, according to the safety director, are to reduce chemical toxicity, standardize purchasing processes and realize economies of scale where possible and to reduce what Cozart calls “impulse buying” (the kind of invisible-to-purchasing, buy-what’s-on-sale mentality that operates for MRO chemicals at many major companies).

“As a safety person, I want to reduce the toxicity of the chemicals we use as an organization,” Cozart says. “But, of course I can’t be everywhere, so I am going to have to find advocates for this program across the country. But I think it’s going to be successful. It’s a really great time for the American Red Cross to embrace this program, and a lot of people are working hard at it,” she says.

In summing up the program, Cozart says there is one other element to the effort that she thinks is perhaps most significant of all.

“Paul O’Neil, former U.S. Secretary of State, once said that safety is not equated with quality, safety is a prerequisite of quality. I believe he’s exactly right,” she says. “Safety first does make for better business. At the American Red Cross we want to establish best practices around that kind of high-quality standard.

“To top everything else off in this program–all the benefits of lower toxicity, lower cost, efficient and available chemical products–our organization wants to show that we have the discipline to truly achieve best practices around chemicals,” Cozart concludes. “Red Cross wants to be an efficient, well-run and quality organization. We are going to make our people safe. And we want to be good corporate stewards.”


From Compliance Side Total Chemical Management Today, Vol. 4. No. 1 2006