Podcast: Materials Declarations and IPC-1754

The Radical Compliance Podcast
The Radical Compliance Podcast
Podcast: Materials Declarations and IPC-1754
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Our latest Radical Compliance podcast is for heavy industry, aerospace, and defense contractors  grappling with hazardous materials in the supply chain, and the new IPC-1754 standard to simplify the declaration of those materials as you send components along to other parties.

The standard is the latest in a family of materials compliance regulations that have been around roughly a decade. Broadly speaking, it requires manufacturers to examine the component materials and processes they use to make finished goods; and then identify various chemicals and materials that could be classified as a high-risk substance before sending the final product upstream.

We caught up with Travis Miller, compliance and regulatory general counsel with Assent Compliance, to walk us through the IPC-1754 standard and how heavy industry might put it to good use. (Disclosure: Assent’s software helps companies with supply chain compliance issues.)

You can hear the full podcast above. Meanwhile, some key points are below.

First, IPC-1754 tries to address the big data capabilities firms need to aggregate all their hazmat information. The standard is machine-readable, which simplifies how companies can compile a bill of materials, and how they read that bill supplied by another party.

More manually based approaches to identifying and declaring hazardous materials can be painstaking. In a jet airliner, for example, “that could be a burden of millions and millions of chemicals in vast sums and variations of concentrations,” Miller said.

Second, we’re still in early adoption. The International Aerospace Environmental Group has been developing IPC-1754 since 2012, and the final standard has only launched this year. The standard tells companies how information about hazardous materials should be encoded, so that IT systems can process the information more quickly and generate reports we humans can read more easily.

Good news, since simplifying and standardizing disclosures is always good for corporate compliance. Now companies will need to develop all the other IT systems and processes to take full advantage of that.

Anyway, more detail is on the podcast. If materials declarations are your bag, have a listen.

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