Children's Safe Product Act: Making an Accessible Shiny App
In 2008 the then governor of Washington State, Chris Gregoire, signed what was considered the strictest law regarding products designed for children in the United States. The Children's Safe Product Act was created to limit the amount of potentially harmful chemical compounds found in products that were made for children. The "Children's Safe Products Reporting Rule" also stipulated that companies would report products that they were selling in the state that contained a Chemical of High Concern to Children (CHCC). These CHCCs were outlined by the Washington State Department of Ecology. The submissions from these companies can be found on the Department of Ecology website. This dataset contains submissions beginning June 1, 2012, through the present.
With 38,000+ products submitted since 2012 that contain potentially harmful chemical compounds, understanding what chemical compounds are found in the products children use is very important for both parents and local retailers alike. While publicly available, the vast amounts of data are likely intimidating to the average person who has little experience navigating a complex dataset. I have created a tool to deal with the complication of various data science experience levels in the general populous.
I have created a Shiny App that allows the user to select a product category of interest and identify companies that have submissions in that category. The user can then take those companies and find more information regarding the chemical compounds found in a specific company's submissions, and the purposes of those compounds in their products. This means the user does not have to attempt to navigate a large dataset, and has a starting point for continuing research on the chemical compounds present in the product they are interested in. This data is meant for public use, and facilitating that use is key to understanding more about the products that children in the state of Washington use.
In the future, increased detection sensitivity during data collection, as well as more conclusive data regarding the effects of specific concentrations of all compounds found in these submissions could greatly increase the power of this application. This data is also limited by the fact that it does not extend to the specific product name. The user will not see the name of the product they see on the shelf in this dataset; connections between the type of product and the company manufacturing that product will have to be made by the user.
