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Announcing VPEP
The National Textile Association (NTA) is pleased to offer to the textile industry and its suppliers our Voluntary Product Environmental Profile (VPEP). We believe that VPEP, by providing a common reporting format, will facilitate efficient exchange, between textile companies and their chemical suppliers, of information needed to make informed decisions regarding the environmental impact of textile products and processes. VPEP was developed by a working group made up of dyestuff and chemical suppliers, textile manufacturers, and professional staff of academic institutions and trade associations of the chemical, dyestuffs, and textile industries.
What is VPEP?
VPEP is a common format that textile companies and their suppliers may use to record and share information about chemical products.
Why should I use VPEP?
By law in the U.S. textile industry chemical suppliers must provide their customers with Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), but not all the information that textile companies and their customers need to know about the chemical composition of products is included in the MSDS, the result is that additional information is requested and provided, with companies reporting in varying formats and degrees of specifity so that it is difficult to locate quickly all necessary data. VPEP is voluntary, but we believe that the time savings that a common format offers both supplier and customer will make VPEP attractive to a large number of companies in textiles and related industries.
How do I use VPEP?
NTA is pleased to offer VPEP at a downloadable, fillable, printable paper form free of charge. To use the paper form VPEP simply click here to open and save to your computer. Be sure to also click here to open the instructions.
NTA is also developing a software version of VPEP that we expect to offer to the industry shortly. The VPEP software will enable you to easily store and edit product information, share information with customers electronically, and search your product database using several search criteria. The software will be offered on an annual subscription basis. The rates, which be on a schedule that takes into account the varying company sizes and nature of business, have not been finalized, but are expected to be low and will be used to fund the initial software development and ongoing updates as regulations and industry practices change. What we can say with certainty is that the NTA VPEP software will cost you less than it would cost a company to develop its own version. For those companies that already have an electronic database they want to continue using, our NTA VPEP software will be adaptable to your systems as well.
Note, that VPEP is a communications tool for use between vendor and customer. NTA is merely providing the common format. For more information contact David Trumbull at (617) 542-8220 or dtrumbull@nationaltextile.org