For many businesses, finding and managing the data required by a growing constellation of regulatory requirements for substances has remained a key challenge.

Ensuring compliance, finding safer alternatives for a huge universe of chemicals, juggling competing goals, and communicating across vast supply chains are all top of mind for regulatory compliance and sustainability leaders.

Chemical Watch News & Insight senior reporter Meg Duff talked with attendees at this September’s Regulatory Summit North America 2025. She asked product steward professionals from various sectors about their biggest pain points and how they are managing them.

Questions and answers have been edited slightly for length and clarity.

Q: What challenges are top of mind for you?

Norman Holley, compliance and regulatory affairs manager, Kem Krest: I would say it’s the amount of data we need to be effective in all the regulatory spaces. For the US specifically, the big march of deregulation is really going to force the uniqueness of regulations among states.

Jennifer Reece, senior sustainability program manager, HP: I think one of the biggest challenges is really understanding all the uses of PFAS and finding safer alternatives that will work for all of our applications. Which is a really big, daunting job!

Kelly Scanlon, lead sustainability strategist, Global Electronics Association: I'll just say reporting and disclosure in general. There are now more requirements – across the globe and deep into the supply chain – than we’ve ever experienced before.

Travis Miller, chief strategy officer and general counsel, Source Intelligence: It's the volume – the volume of new rules, the volume of new chemical controls.

Sara Frojen, senior product steward and regulatory affairs specialist, Hexion: It’s like, all right, what's next week's flavour going to be? Now I'm going to have to add a 20th letter to my list of "No, it does not contain this chemical".

Marissa Cartwright, regulatory affairs supervisor, Teknor Apex Company: Low-level content management and declarations and recycled sources and materials do not mix. The recyclers say that they are too far removed in the supply chain from the source of the polymers to know the information.

Colin Preston, managing consultant, circular economy and resource management practice, Ramboll: Sustainability as a feature in packaging has shifted to being a mandate, no longer a consumer-facing marketing feature. So, how do you navigate these new landscapes that might actually make compromises in the packaging designs from a food safety and product safety standpoint?

Nichole Knight, regulatory engineer, NVENT Management: The biggest challenge is a lack of standardisation for reporting data. Industries utilise different third parties, or they build their own tool, and those tools don't really communicate with each other.

Certain industries want you to use one tool, while others want you to use a different one, so it sort of makes a muck of things. The US government didn’t make a lot of official forms, so companies requesting data from suppliers have free will to utilise whatever software they want and utilise any type of form.

Q: Where do you see bright spots as people work to address these challenges?

Norman Holley: I'm really proud of how we handled extended producer responsibility (EPR) this year. We started really working hard on gathering all that information. And when our suppliers started asking us, or our customers started asking us, for that data, we knew we were going to have it.

Jennifer Reece: I can go in and talk to almost anybody in our procurement and R&D group, and people have really been very responsive.

We all have different roles, and everybody's working on different things, but we can still rely on each other. It really is a combined effort to solve these issues.

Kelly Scanlon: Even though you have this high hurdle of reporting and disclosure, you also have these processes that are coming into play that help you to realise that.

It's encouraging more conversation, and it's encouraging more data exchange – and clever ways to exchange data. And that actually helps the greater good, because it goes well beyond compliance.

Travis Miller: I think the volume of new rules is a forcing function – it's making people buy into full material disclosure (FMD). People have been talking about FMD for 20 years. It always was a declaration Nirvana, like "Someday we'll get there!" That someday is here.

Sarah Frojen: How do you make it where the customer can just click a button and be like alright, "does this contain ... X?" I think that, somehow, everything’s going to be automated.

Our company’s going all in on AI solutions to simplify compliance.

Marissa Cartwright: One way to get more information on recycled sources is to encourage recyclers to communicate with the sources of their scrap articles.

Your blue recycling bin, that's a hard thing. But if you’re taking post-industrial waste, rather than post-consumer waste, the industry is the consumer. If you can be a sole polymer manufacturer to someone like a medical device company, some regulated market, and then get their scrap back and work with their scrap haulers – there’s opportunity there.

Colin Preston: Suppliers, manufacturers and brands are working together to reach solutions.

An example that I recently heard of was a home-compostable deli meat tray. Those stakeholders never sat together. There's a lot of concern on the intellectual property. But through some probably very nuanced lawyering, they were able to release this product at retail that actually overcomes a lot of waste.

Nichole Knight: The ‘why’ behind product compliance gets me excited. Even though it's a struggle, we're still trying to make a better future.