Author: Green Seal

This is part of a series of stories about Green Seal’s Compass. Find related stories here.

Green Seal’s work follows a compass that focuses on four key targets: protecting human health, minimizing waste, ensuring clean water, and preserving the climate. This compass keeps us focused on Green Seal’s priority impacts, ensuring that Green Seal certification reflects products and services that are safer for people and our planet. In this blog post, I will describe how Green Seal verifies that certified products protect the health of water resources.

What You Should Know About Water Pollution

Water pollution is a global issue and a continuing challenge in the U.S. Almost half of our rivers and streams are unsuitable for fishing or swimming because of high concentrations of pollutants.

Water pollution sources are diverse, ranging from agricultural and stormwater runoff to industrial spills, discarded tires, wastewater discharges, and the chemical soup of landfill leachate. Toxic chemicals in conventional household and commercial products can contaminate water bodies when these products are manufactured, used, and improperly disposed of.

Green Seal encourages and incentivizes companies to avoid water pollution by designing greener, healthier products that phase out hazardous chemicals from products and supply chains, instead of shifting the burden of chemical pollution to wastewater treatment plants.

Our High Standard for Ensuring Clean Water

The Green Seal Certification Mark helps buyers find products that are verified to be safer for aquatic ecosystems and to preserve our water quality. Below is an overview of some of the water protective requirements in Green Seal standards.

Products Cannot Be Harmful to Aquatic Life

Green Seal evaluates each ingredient in certified products to verify that the product is not harmful to aquatic life, meaning that short-term exposure to the ingredient will not harm fish or other organisms.

Green Seal does this by verifying an ingredient’s median lethal concentration of fish or its median effective concentration for immobilization of daphnia (water fleas). This means that a study has been conducted to identify how much of the ingredient will kill or immobilize half of the exposed test organisms over the course of a few days. If a small amount of an ingredient can kill half of the test organisms, that ingredient is classified as toxic to aquatic life. In general, when a study shows that an ingredient’s median concentration is greater than 100 milligrams per liter of test water, it is considered not harmful to aquatic life.

Products Must Be Biodegradable

Cleaning and facility care products can be formulated with chemicals that are persistent in the environment. Persistent chemicals take more than 40 days in typical aquatic conditions to break down into carbon dioxide, water, and harmless minerals. Because persistent chemicals remain in the environment longer, they have more time and opportunity to do harm than chemicals that are highly toxic but degrade rapidly. For example, certain surfactants in conventional cleaning products break down into nonylphenols which are toxic to aquatic life, are endocrine disruptors, and can take five years to degrade. Another example, per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS), can take decades or longer to degrade and are linked to prostate, breast, liver, and ovarian cancers and endocrine disruption.

Green Seal screens cleaning products to verify that ingredients are biodegradable in aquatic settings based on internationally accepted definitions and test methods.

Chemicals Must Not Bioaccumulate

Certain chemicals are known to accumulate in the body tissue of animals and people. Even though a chemical may exist at very low levels in food or water, when it enters our bodies faster than it leaves, it can build up and cause numerous adverse health effects. Certain bioaccumulative chemicals are associated with cancer and neurological damage. Mercury is a well-known heavy metal that bioaccumulates in fish, which is why the US Food and Drug Administration sets guidelines of 2-3 weekly servings of fish for young children and pregnant women. Certain PFAS, the persistent chemicals mentioned above, also bioaccumulate in human tissue, fish, and other wildlife.

Green Seal prohibits the use of chemicals that bioaccumulate in certified cleaning products.

Products Cannot Contain Optical Brighteners

Optical brighteners are a type of chemical used in laundry cleaning products to make fabrics seem whiter and brighter. Optical brighteners are prohibited because they are not readily biodegradable and may bioaccumulate — therefore failing two of Green Seal’s hazard endpoints.

Products Must Limit Phosphorous Use to Prevent Eutrophication

Eutrophication is when rivers, lakes, and coastal waters become saturated with nitrogen or phosphorus, causing the rapid growth of aquatic plants and algae, some of which are toxic. These plants are consumed by microbes that deplete the oxygen in the water, creating expansive “dead zones” where fish and aquatic life cannot survive. Eutrophication reduces biodiversity, affects water clarity, and often produces a terrible stench. When eutrophication occurs in marine waters, the plants and algae decompose and release carbon dioxide into the water – making ocean water more acidic and harming many species of marine life, including fish and shellfish.

Green Seal sets limits on phosphorus use to prevent certified cleaning products from contributing to eutrophication.

Companies Must Conserve Water

Certain Green Seal standards set limits on water usage, which is another important way to protect our water resources.

Hotels and lodging properties certified to Green Seal’s gold standard have saved up to 10 million gallons of water a year by meeting Green Seal’s criteria for using water-saving toilets and fixtures.

Manufacturers of Green Seal-certified sanitary paper products must meet limits on gallons of water used to produce a ton of final product.

Impacts that Matter

Producing greener products, fostering greener supply chains, and implementing water conservation policies are critical steps that today’s leaders are taking on the path to a low impact economy. Green Seal recognizes these leaders with third-party certification so that you can identify choices that protect public health, safeguard our rivers and lakes, and preserve our climate.

This is part of a series of stories about Green Seal’s Compass. Find related stories here.

Green Seal’s work follows a compass that focuses on four key targets: protecting human health, minimizing waste, ensuring clean water, and preserving the climate. This compass keeps us focused on Green Seal’s priority impacts, ensuring that Green Seal certification reflects products and services that are safer for people and our planet. In this blog post, I will describe how Green Seal verifies that certified products have achieved significant waste minimization across the product lifecycle.

Addressing Product Waste Across the Lifecycle

Online shopping in the U.S. rose by an astonishing 32% in 2020 over the previous year, representing $790 billion in consumer spending. While many of us are conscientiously flattening the cardboard boxes, crumpling the hard plastics, and collecting the plastic film wrappings, we are seeking more sustainable options. Research shows more than half of US consumers are concerned with the environmental impact of packaging waste. To shift industry toward meaningful and significant waste prevention and minimization, and allow product users to dispose responsibly, Green Seal verifies waste minimization across the product lifecycle – from raw materials selection, product design, and production to transportation and end-of-life.

Raw Materials

Recovered materials: preventing de-forestation and lowering emissions

Designing single-use tissue products with high levels of recycled content not only prevents deforestation but also reduces the carbon emissions generated during production.

Green Seal-certified bath tissue, facial tissue, and foodservice napkins are required to be composed of 100 percent recycled material – that means that there is no virgin fiber in those products. Why? These products are single use. Unlike writing paper, which can be recycled, it is important to design products based on how many times they can be re-used.

Choosing certified products adds up to big impacts. Green Seal-certified recycled-content sanitary paper saves 3.2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year, the equivalent of taking 695,936 cars off the road for a year.

Product Design, Production, and Transportation

Concentration requirements: curbing plastic use and lowering emissions

Professional products and, more recently, a variety of household cleaning products – including laundry detergent pods and sheets – are shifting to concentrated products. This significantly reduces carbon emissions by avoiding shipping water weight from the manufacturing plant to the distribution center and then to a store, office, or home. For example, a conventional glass cleaner sold in the US can be filled with more than 90% water – meaning you can seek out low-carbon products simply by choosing products that come as concentrated pods and solid bars or sheets – instead of ready-to-use liquids.

To achieve certification, Green Seal requires professional products to be concentrated at the following levels:

• For general-purpose cleaners: at least 1:32 — 1 part product to 32 parts water
• For glass, restroom, and carpet cleaner: at least 1:16

Another significant benefit to concentrated products is the associated reduction in plastic use from replacing disposable plastic spray bottles with reusable systems. Case in point: Green Seal-certified concentrated cleaning products saved 197 million pounds of plastic in 2020 alone – the equivalent of 1.2 billion industry standard plastic bottles. 

Greener packaging materials – Preserving resources and curbing plastic use 

Green Seal requires packaging to be either source-reduced, recyclable, contain at least 25% percent post-consumer material, or be a refillable package with an effective take-back program. Additionally, we don’t allow secondary packaging unless the product is a concentrate – like a pod, for example. This means that the product can’t be packaged in a rigid plastic and then again in a cardboard box. We also verify that packaging is not produced with hazardous toxins such as phthalates, BPA, and heavy metals. Materials that contain fewer hazardous chemicals can be re-processed and recycled more easily. 

Product Use

Product functional performance: preventing wasted resources

Many of us have surely purchased a product, tried it out, and sadly tossed it in the trash after one or two disappointing experiences. It didn’t remove a stain, the odor from your sneakers was not hidden under the stench of the fragrance, or the paint required five applications before it looked consistent on your wall. Green Seal sets performance requirements to make sure that the products we certify work effectively, meaning they work according to a standardized test or work as well as a market-leading or nationally available product on the North American market.

Ensuring that certified products perform as well as or better than conventional alternatives avoids waste from discarded products that fail to meet consumer expectations.

Product durability

For certain product types – such as paints — durability is a critical concern; a long-lasting product greatly reduces the environmental impact. For example, if you buy a paint product that lasts 2-3 years, you will end up using twice as many resources as if you had used a paint that lasts 5-7 years.

Impacts that Matter 

Preventing and minimizing waste is a critical goal for shifting to a low impact economy – one in which we are healthier, our rivers and lakes are cleaner, and our climate is preserved.

With improved product design, less shipping of water, greater use of recovered materials, and well-performing, long-lasting products, we can reduce the waste that is so costly to our society and ecosystems. Leading product manufacturers are doing the work: they’re shifting their supply chains and investing in greener technologies – and achieving recognition through Green Seal product certification. With the complexity of the market, the Green Seal Certification Mark provides clarity, signifying that a product meets a strong benchmark of health and environmental leadership — thereby making it simple for buyers to make the greener choice.