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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CM (Prevention of Cosmetic-Induced Non-Communicable Diseases and Micro Plastics entering Food Chains with the CosmEthics- Health App)

Teaser

Summary

Project has been initiated 1st December 2016. CosmEthics, with its E-solutions, helps EU citizens to identify cosmetics products with potential hazard ingredients (EU Annex II prohibited chemicals, carcinogens, hormones, allergens), and helps them to find better alternatives based on scientific research and user tailored preferences (allergies, vegan, plastics). Nearly all EU citizens use some form of personal hygiene products in the scope of cosmetics. Cosmetics are a major source of water and food chain pollution via the microplastics they often contain.

The overall objectives of the project included a feasibility study of a web plugin service for third party use (including authority use), how lab tests could be integrated into our service for measuring and detecting carcinogenic substance doses in sample products, how collaboration with local authorities and EU Parliament/Commission can be built to enable sharing of surveillance data we capture in our database through our analyses, and a freedom to operate study on our IP under development. We also wanted to assess how frequent plastics are as a compound in cosmetic compositions to help evaluate impact on environment in further studies.

Work performed

Conclusions: Our web plugin has been developed to a level, which enables integration to third party sites, lab-tests were successfully performed measuring acetaldehyde counts in popular perfumes enabling quantifiable data to supplement alert listings, our project lead met with representatives of EU Parliament and Commission in Brussels to discuss collaboration, and data on Annex II breaches in a specific chemical group was sent to (Finnish) chemicals surveillance as a data handover. Our freedom to operate study was successfully conducted, and did not identify barriers to proceeding with our IP protection and commercialization, and our marketing campaign on raising consumer awareness reached over 5M views from EU citizens by the end of the project period.

Final results

We found a surprisingly high count, 42% of cosmetic products in our database, to contain one or more of 513 various plastic chemicals in their formulation. The impact of this on aquatic life should be studied further, particularly as cosmetic plastic contamination may be irreversible. Currently our tool, with EU wide consumer adoption, is an effective method for prevention of cosmetic induced aquatic contamination of various chemicals including plastics and hormone disruptors. Similarly so, the tool is an effective way to monitor and avoid Annex II prohibited, and CMR categorised substances for multiple user groups: authorities, consumers, and businesses in the EU market.