Safety and health index development for formulated product design: Paint formulation

¹ Centre of Hydrogen Energy, Institute of Future Energy, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia
² Department of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA, 40450 Selangor, Malaysia
³ Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering/Centre of Excellence for Green Technologies, The University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus, Broga Road, 43500 Selangor, Malaysia

^* Corresponding author: mimi@cheme.utm.my

Abstract

Over the years, safety and health effects among consumers due to the exposure of formulated products have been reported. Thus, there is a need for systematic methodologies to assess the safety and health effects of the candidate’s ingredients in the early stages of formulated product design. Therefore, an index-based methodology was proposed to assess the safety and health effects in formulated product design. Product Safety and Health Index (PSHI) highlights the health sub-indexes based on the exposure routes including eye, inhalation, ingestion, and dermal. Each exposure route has its corresponding health sub-indexes that have to be applied. There are also new sub-indexes introduced for ingestion and dermal exposure. A case study on paint formulation was used to illustrate the developed methodology. The results show that the newly proposed index is able to identify hazardous chemical ingredient(s) with its corresponding adverse safety and health effects.