STEP 5: Post-Market Environmental Monitoring

It is not uncommon for P&G to send scientists around the world to measure the actual environmental concentrations of a product after it has been marketed for some time. This is called
field monitoring . This is done most often for high volume ingredients, many of which are commodity ingredients; in other words, they are used by many companies.

The result, ideally, is a confirmation of the expected concentrations of these ingredients in household wastewater, effluent from wastewater treatment plants and rivers downstream from these plants. We normally find that the actual concentrations are lower than the estimated ones, which is due to the built-in conservatism in our estimation methods.

Once completed, the ecotoxicology , environmental fate and environmental risk assessment as well as monitoring studies are often published in peer-reviewed scientific literature.