2025 ICPHSO Annual Meeting and Training Symposium

This session will explore how businesses can effectively align their compliance and sustainability goals by leveraging smart chemical testing strategies. The focus will be on navigating a complex landscape of global regulations, including California Proposition 65, US State PFAS regulations, children’s product reporting rules, and European REACH and POP regulations. The panel will also emphasize the critical role of raw material management and the involvement of industry trade organizations in driving collaboration to meet both regulatory and sustainability challenges. Attendees will gain valuable and actionable insights on integrating chemical management into broader sustainability strategies while ensuring compliance across multiple jurisdictions.

Toy design often starts with engineers, but ensuring accessibility to play with that toy isn’t always part of the equation. By collaborating with experts like occupational therapists, toys can be designed to include as many children as possible, regardless of ability.

This interactive session is designed to get product designers, engineers and product safety professionals to expand their approach to inclusive product design. After a brief presentation by a safety and compliance engineer and an occupational therapist, attendees will work in small groups to redesign a toy based on real-world child's disability considerations. Through hands-on ideation, participants will explore how to integrate inclusive principles into their design process.

After this session, attendees will have a deeper understanding of how to incorporate diverse needs into product development, ultimately expanding play opportunities for more children. They’ll also take-home practical strategies for applying disability-inclusive design principles across all products.

Standards are powerful and effective tools that are widely used by countries to implement legal requirements and ensure product safety. Knowledge of how standards work is key to product safety compliance.

This presentation aims to provide clear picture of the complicated standard system and the implementation of standards in China. It will also include an introduction of standardization in EU and USA, as well as comparison of the three jurisdictions.

The presentation will help the attendees to understand the challenges in compliance with standards. At the same time, providing suggestions and tips on how to overcome the difficulties.

The panel will discuss the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) topic, which is widely applied in different industries and involves stakeholders, retailers, brands, manufacturers, and others. The panel will discuss what LCA is, how it is calculated, and why is it becoming a key element in products safety and environmental assessment. Additionally, the panel with also look into how LCA is shaping new emerging regulation around the world and how will the results of LCA be used in different industries. What are the main datapoints and preparation needed in order to carry out LCAs, how to take into consideration the reusability, repairability of products, and what are the expectations in different industries.

This interactive session with a Program Specialist from CPSC's Small Business Ombudsman office provides attendees an opportunity to ask regulatory and other CPSC related questions through the meeting app. 

In a world where legislation is becoming increasingly complex and supply chains are growing more intricate, managing overheads and ensuring compliance are becoming more challenging than ever. This session, titled "One Product – Many Versions," will delve into the multiple layers of data that shape a product’s journey to market. From test data, labeling, certifications, customer feedback, ESG compliance to legislative data, each layer is crucial for connecting and aligning product safety stakeholders and ensuring meets market needs. The panel will discuss how to effectively navigate these layers, providing practical tips for managing the complexities of compliance in today’s demanding regulatory environment.

The ASTM F3463 Standard Guide for Ensuring the Safety of Connected Consumer Products has recently been updated to include Artificial Intelligence (AI). In consumer products, AI refers to software algorithms that use machine learning and data to perceive the item's environment and users, and autonomously makes decisions to optimize function and user experience. In this session, we will explore why AI is not like other technologies the industry is already familiar with. We will look at some of the unique hazards that can form when using AI, and why the mitigation of risk with AI is unlike anything we have seen before. We will provide insights on how to test AI in connected consumer products. We will provide guidance for different stakeholders on how to establish safety assessment due diligence for a technology that continues to evolve and adapt.