Elevance awarded green prize for its sustainable activity

Elevance Renewable Sciences has been awarded the 2012 Presidential Green Challenge Award by the US Environmental Protection Agency for its production of “high performing, green specialty chemicals at advantageous costs.”

The Illinois based company produces its green chemicals from renewable oils and has bio refineries in Indonesia and Mississippi.

Green

The EPA awards companies for chemical products or processes that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances applying right the way across the life cycle of a product, including its design, manufacture, and use.

According to the Agency's website, Elevance's production processes use innovations in metathesis catalysis that consumes significantly less energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent compared to petrochemical technologies.

Elevance is honoured to be recognised by the EPA for our work in bringing innovation in the renewable chemistry industry,” says CEO K’Lynne Johnson.

EPA investments

Earlier in the year, the US Environmental Protection Agency received $1.2 million in private sector research funding from global cosmetic company L’Oreal in a bid to determine if its chemical toxicity forecaster (ToxCast) can be used in systemic toxicity tests and replace current methods that involve animals. 

The EPA is using ToxCast to screen chemicals to understand their potential impact on processes in the human body that lead to adverse health effects, and this alliance could serve as a milestone towards animal-free safety testing.

Then Laurent Attal, executive vice-president L’Oreal Research & Innovation said; "For more than 30 years, we have invested in Predictive Evaluation for Safety, in other words, animal-free toxicology."

“Our new L’Oréal Predictive Evaluation Center‘s activity is based on new-generation tests, using reconstructed human tissues, automated platforms, molecular modeling… In this perspective, the ToxCast program from EPA could enrich our testing platforms and help us to predict the safety of substances for our products earlier," he concluded.

Cosmetic ingredients will be evaluated using ToxCast; made up of over 700 ultra-fast non-animal tests.