Category: Science-Based Standards

Why We’re Certifying Safer Alcohol-Based Hand Sanitizers

Posted on by Taryn Tuss

Green Seal is now certifying hand sanitizers that meet the highest standard for safety and performance in the marketplace.

With the COVID-19 pandemic spurring many first-time producers to enter the market, the FDA has warned consumers to avoid hundreds of hand sanitizers because of high levels of hazardous ingredients including methanol (wood alcohol) and the contaminant 1-propanol.  Meanwhile, even when properly formulated, hand sanitizers can include hazardous ingredients linked to cancer, allergies, and skin and eye irritation – even if they have an ecolabel.  

With our new certification program, Green Seal is providing consumers, purchasers and facility managers a simple way to identify hand sanitizers that meet the highest standard for health, safety and performance.  

The Highest Standard of Clean

Formulating with healthier ingredients is vital for a product that people apply to their skin dozens of times a day. Our new certification standard, created with input from public health and industry experts, screens 100% of alcohol-based hand sanitizer product formulas for:

  • carcinogens
  • reproductive toxins
  • skin irritants
  • phthalates
  • parabens, and
  • contaminants

And as always, consumers can be confident that Green Seal-certified products meet uncompromising performance standards, do not pollute waterways, and use environmentally preferable packaging materials.

Verification By a Trusted Authority 

Our new hand sanitizer certification program is part of our commitment to leverage our expertise in healthy and sustainable cleaning and facility care to help protect people from both COVID-19 and negative health impacts from toxic chemicals. 

  • Green Seal’s Guidelines for Safer Cleaning and Disinfection for schools and workplaces have been adopted by commercial cleaning companies servicing more than 1 billion square feet of space.
  • We’ve partnered with SEIU 32BJ, the largest union of property service workers in the U.S., on COVID-19 training for its members.
  • More than 30,000 Green Seal certified products are used in offices, schools and homes each day, including cleaning products and hand soaps critical to de-contaminating buildings and protecting people.

Learn more about Green Seal certification for hand sanitizers here. 

A Trend in COVID-19 Cleaning Is Hazardous to Your Health

Posted on by Doug Gatlin

COVID-19 has precipitated a worrying cleaning trend that’s getting little airtime – excessive exposure to hazardous cleaning and disinfecting chemicals that itself can endanger health. To reassure people about the safety of indoor spaces during the pandemic, some workplaces are turning to unnecessary or even counterproductive cleaning and disinfection methods – a practice the Atlantic calls “hygiene theater.” 

The Best Disinfecting Tool is Accurate Information 

After physical distancing and mask-wearing, the best tool to combat COVID-19 is accurate information. We have good reason to believe that schools and workplaces don’t need to turn to hazardous methods to effectively clean and disinfect for COVID-19.  Consider that:

  • COVID-19 is most likely to spread through person-to-person and airborne transmission. In fact, no specific reports of transmission from surface-to-person had been recorded as of the July 9 publication of this World Health Organization report.
  • Coronaviruses, such as the COVID-19 virus, are relatively easy to kill on environmental surfaces.

While companies are increasingly asking for or advertising frequent disinfecting, as a general rule only high-touch surfaces (such as door handles and elevator buttons) should be frequently disinfected. Applying the product correctly is also important, as over-using a product will not be more effective at killing the COVID-19 virus and leads to waste and unnecessary chemical exposure.

Foggers Are Poor Choices For Schools and Offices

Application technologies like foggers are being heavily marketed as COVID-19 disinfecting solutions. These are a poor choice for school and office environments – they promote hazardous levels of chemical exposure without any benefit, as there is no evidence that they are more effective than traditional application methods. 

As some schools prepare to reopen, administrators should consider that disinfectants can include ingredients linked to asthma, cancer and endocrine disruption. Applying them in excess can create significant health risks for students and staff, including – ironically – serious respiratory disease.  

This is an especially grave risk for the 1 in 13 Americans with asthma – a group the CDC has identified as high-risk for COVID-19. Choosing safer proven-effective products, especially those that do not contain asthmagens or respiratory irritants, is critical for protecting high-risk groups. (Green Seal’s list of recommended safer COVID-19 disinfectants is here.)

Hazardous Chemicals May Do More Harm Than Good

Dousing a space in hazardous chemicals won’t necessarily better prevent the spread of COVID-19, but it will lead to significant health risks for those inside. The good news is that there are effective ways disinfect for COVID-19 while protecting health, safety and indoor air quality. 

Green Seal’s Safer COVID-19 Disinfecting Guidelines are a free resource for comprehensively protecting the health of building occupants and cleaning personnel during the pandemic.  And Green Seal’s public health lead Nina Hwang provides additional information on safe and effective disinfection here.

Titanium Dioxide Whitens in Enzyme-Based Cleaning

Posted on by Green Seal

Green Seal has issued new editions of our cleaning product standards with one minor change: We now allow titanium dioxide as an ingredient in enzyme-based products, within certain conditions.

Titanium dioxide is a colorant that is included to whiten and brighten many types of products – from food to paints and personal care products. In enzyme-based cleaning products, like with paints and makeup, consumers show preference for whiter and brighter options and this is why manufacturers see titanium dioxide as a key ingredient.

Titanium dioxide was previously prohibited in all cleaning products because it is classified as a “Group 2B” carcinogen, i.e., “Possibly Carcinogenic” when inhaled1 (and only when inhaled).  Because we’ve seen this ingredient in a wide range of enzyme-based cleaning products, we conducted several health impact analyses and identified a meaningful solution. We developed a set of requirements that ensures that titanium dioxide particles will not become airborne when the product is used. Below we’ve walked through this framework of requirements and summarized our key considerations, but you can find the full technical proposal on our website.

 Our Open and Transparent Process

As always, we published this proposal for public comment and actively solicited feedback during a six-month period in order to ensure that we heard perspectives from all interested groups. This open process and our evidence-based decision-making is at the core of Green Seal standard development.

Green Seal Focuses on What Matters

We take our role seriously as an environmental organization that sets the bar for sustainability and defines meaningful health protections for products and services. We work to advance industries toward healthier, safer, and greener practices, and also to ensure a wide range of certified products so that conscious consumers can have their pick.

In this case, the results of our health impact analyses demonstrated that we could confidently allow manufactures to provide certified products that are formulated with titanium dioxide. With this move, we ensure that these certified products can be just as white and bright as their conventional counterparts while being significantly healthier and greener. It’s a minor change for our standards; this is one of more than 65,000 chemicals that we scrutinize during our certification processes – however, it’s a meaningful change for our product manufacturing community and a reminder that we focus on real-world health and environmental impacts instead of simply checking the boxes.  

 Protecting the Health of the User

In our proposal, we demonstrated that titanium dioxide can be present in an enzyme-based cleaning product without any risk of the product user inhaling this compound.

  • For foam, gel, and liquid products – the product itself does not become airborne. Therefore, we set no conditions on allowing titanium dioxide as an ingredient.
  • For solid products, dust can be generated by the product that could be inhaled during the use phase. Therefore, in order to include titanium dioxide as an ingredient, the manufacturer must provide evidence that the titanium dioxide particles are bound within the product matrix or to bonded to other product ingredients. This protective requirement aligns with the protections stated by the State of California’s Proposition 65 program, which only considers titanium dioxide carcinogenic when it is airborne and unbound.
  • For liquid products, there is an existing Green Seal requirement that states that enzyme-based cleaning products cannot be sold in spray packaging; therefore, we’ve already set requirements that prevent liquid from becoming airborne via dispersed spray and inhaled by the product user.

Within this framework, Green Seal has maintained a strict level of health protections for product users. As always, when Green Seal appears on a product label, consumers can be confident that these products will work effectively, will protect their family, workers, and our environment – and now, thanks to this revision, these products might be a bit whiter.

Update: TCSA (Toxic Substances Control Act) Amendment

Posted on by Green Seal

Recently, Green Seal’s standards development team attended a conference on the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act, which celebrated its 1-year anniversary. We greatly enjoyed the candid conversations between the heavy hitters: government officials, members of Congress, representatives from industry, and environmental advocates.

The bill was signed into law on June 22, 2016 by President Obama, and was widely proclaimed a success. Soon after the signing, the usual political chatter began: cheers (a rare show of bipartisanship!), grumbles (the law was decades overdue), jitters (could the EPA handle the ambitious time lines?), shrugs and yawns (too many compromises). We, in Green Seal’s Washington, DC’s headquarters, sometimes enjoy the political opera, especially since we remain happily seated in the mezzanine. I, and my friends in the DC environmental community, were heartened by the news: the EPA now had greater authority, strict time lines for progress, and dependable funding sources for implementing effective chemical regulation.

Chemical Safety, The Previous Version

The law is an update and expansion of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) (“Ta-Ska”), which defined the federal regulation of chemicals. Unlike the other major environmental legislation of the 1960s and 70s (The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, CERCLA, RCRA, etc.) which responded to pollution and hazardous chemical releases after the fact, TSCA was intended to prevent hazardous chemicals from entering the market. The EPA was authorized and required to track chemicals that were being manufactured or processed, to evaluate new chemicals for health and environmental impacts, and to regulate (restrict, ban or in some way control) those chemicals that were identified as hazardous. TSCA implementation was slow and often ineffective because of legal loopholes, an overworked and underfunded agency, and general disinterest among members of Congress. Pushed to fill what they saw as a public health protections gap, state health departments and legislative bodies established state-wide chemical regulation programs, which sometimes caused confusion and frustration for product companies and chemical suppliers. With a goal of simplifying and re-nationalizing US chemical regulation, TSCA reform became a priority for businesses and chemical manufacturers. From 2009 to 2016, members of Congress, environmental advocates, and industry groups worked on the reform bill, and ultimately passed the Lautenberg Act in the House of Representatives with a vote of 403 to 12, and passed the Act in the Senate with a voice vote.

About the Lautenberg Act (TSCA Amendment)

  • The EPA no longer needs to identify a regulatory action that is “least burdensome” to industry when carrying out a chemical ban, restriction, or exposure reduction measure.
  • The EPA is no longer required to conduct a cost-benefit analysis along with its chemical assessments, and is, in fact, prohibited from factoring in the financial impacts of a regulatory action.
  • The Act requires the EPA to protect vulnerable populations: “”the health of children, pregnant women, the elderly, workers, consumers, the general public, and the environmental from the risk of harmful exposures to chemical substances and mixtures.” One year in, the EPA has made real progress.
  • June 22, 2017: The EPA issued Final TSCA Framework Rules (National Law Review)
  • Announced the scopes of the risk evaluations for the first ten chemicals (EPA)
  • Dozens of new chemical determinations were completed in June 2017 and nearly 1,000 new chemical determinations were completed from June 2016 to June 2017 (EPA – Actively updating the number of completed determinations).

Green Seal’s Chemical Considerations

The ongoing implementation of the Lautenberg Act has had no direct effect on Green Seal, our standard development, or our product evaluation processes. In their chemical assessment process, the EPA is identifying and regulating the most harmful chemicals; Green Seal is defining and validating the qualities of environmental leadership products – that they are formulated with safer chemicals, perform effectively, and have an overall lower environmental and health impact. However, TSCA Reform may eventually lead to a change in Green Seal’s standards. If the floor for chemical safety rises in the US market, we may see a significant shift in the formulations of all products, and further improvements to leadership products. If this shift takes place, Green Seal will update our standards in order to accurately reflect the new levels of leadership.

A Different Level of Scrutiny: While the EPA conducts risk analyses, Green Seal emphasizes chemical hazards. One of our major goals of product certification is to encourage the elimination of hazardous chemicals on the US market.

Identifying New Chemicals of Concern: In our product reviews, Green Seal ensures that products are not formulated with persistent / bioaccumulative / toxic substances (“PBTs”) and one way that we accomplish this is by noting the chemicals of concern that are listed in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. As the EPA gathers and reports the results of toxicological evaluations, new PBTs may be identified, which would better inform our evaluation.

A Clearer Evaluation Process for Companies: Companies with Green Seal-certified products will benefit from a clear and consistent framework for the evaluation of chemical substance and the associated risks, and from the new data that will result from the evaluation process. (Looking through rose-colored beakers…) Perhaps TSCA Reform will also spur green chemistry innovations, increasing the numbers of safer substitutes, and simplifying the process of developing safer formulations.

To learn more about TSCA Reform, the Lautenberg Act, and EPA’s progress since June 2016, check out the following links:

Study Quantifies GHG Reductions of Certified Hotels

Posted on by Green Seal

In a market full of different certifiers, it is important for hotels to distinguish between a green-washed standard and one with real environmental benefits.

Green Seal recently collaborated with the Bren School of Environmental Sciences and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on a year-long study to quantify the environmental benefits (in terms of greenhouse gas [GHG] reductions) for hotels in the City of Los Angeles that are certified under Green Seal’s hotel standard (GS-33).

Let’s go back a few years to get the full picture…. in 2008, the City of Los Angeles recognized the role hotels can play in reducing the city’s overall GHG emissions, and created the Los Angeles Green Lodging Program (LAGLP) to meet its Climate Action Plan goals.  Green Seal was selected as the official certifier for the LAGLP, which now has 7 certified participating hotels including: JW Marriott Los Angeles LIVE, Hilton Universal City, Hilton Los Angeles Airport, Sheraton Gateway, Crowne Plaza, Westin Bonaventure, and Westin Los Angeles Airport. Los Angeles now has more Green Seal-certified hotels than any city in the nation (over 6 million square feet certified), with a number of additional hotels in the process of getting certified.  Until the recent Bren Study, however, neither the City nor Green Seal had a quantitative metric of the environmental benefits of the LAGLP.

The Bren team used electricity consumption data from 6 certified hotels in Los Angeles, and found that on average:

  • entering at Bronze level saw 2.8% reduction in GHG emissions,
  • those progressing to Silver saw an added reduction of 8.8% (hotels entering directly at Silver would see a 2.8% + 8.8% = 11.6% reduction)
  • those progressing to Gold saw a further reduction of 18.2% (hotels entering directly at Gold would see a 11.6% + 18.2% = 29.8% reduction)

The Bren team took this study one step further to see how Green Seal certification benefits a hotel itself. They conducted surveys of over 1000 participants and found that consumers were willing to pay $6.50 more per night for hotels with demonstrated sustainability measures.

A case study by the Bren team showed that meeting the most basic requirement in the GS-33 standard of upgrading lighting (mandated by the Bronze level), can reduce a hotel’s emissions by a total of 1,066 MT CO2 annually, which is equivalent to emissions from 225 passenger vehicles driven for a year. Furthermore, these replacements reaped financial benefits as well: over a 20-year project cash flow period, the hotel would see $1,562,157 in cumulative savings from avoided utility costs.  Hotels can target lighting upgrades as “low-hanging fruit” thatyield higher benefits than costs. 

Green Seal avoiding C02

Finally, the Bren team also created a user-friendly Excel-based tool that can be used by an individual hotel to calculate its GHG reductions and financial savings from different energy and electricity reduction projects undertaken because of Green Seal certification. This tool can be used by hotel managers and engineers to calculate their GHG and long-term financial savings.

As hotels across the globe increasingly embrace green practices, it is important for the lodging industry to pursue practices with real environmental benefits. Hotels can be one of the most energy and GHG intensive buildings, as they tend to keep lights on throughout hallways at night or run thermostats even when there are no occupants in the room. Green Seal’s GS-33 Hotels and Lodging Properties standard requires hotels to upgrade their energy intensive equipment and to integrate sustainability practices in their daily operations.

The Bren study strengthens the findings of an independent study by Washington State University, which stated that:  “The single most important thing is to become certified by an independent and credible agency such as Green Seal and Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED), the major certification programs in the lodging industry.”

Green Seal - Bren Study

Your Feedback Is Key to the Success of Our Standards

Posted on by Green Seal

Over the past twenty-seven years, Green Seal has published dozens of environmental leadership standards and certified over 4,000 products. We have achieved the most success over these years in the cleaning product industry, and have invested greatly in helping manufacturers green their products. About one-third of our 27 active standards define environmental leadership for specific types of cleaning products. For cleaning product manufacturers and for institutional purchasers, Green Seal is a well-known product certifier. Our services are trusted and respected, and the Green Seal Certification Mark is a widely recognized symbol that shows that a product has been evaluated for both performance and environmental leadership. A key facet of our success has been that our certification process is transparent and scientific; certification is based on our accurate and publicly available environmental leadership standards.

Transparent Requirements to Achieve Certification 

To understand Green Seal certification, anyone can download a specific standard (a free PDF on our website) and note each of the requirements for performance, human health protection, and environmental leadership. For example, purchasers know that a Green Seal-certified cleaning product has demonstrated a specific level of performance, that it is not formulated with certain hazardous substances, and that it has an overall reduced environmental impact compared to most other products on the market.

A Bit of Maintenance: Keeping Our Standards Clear and Accurate

The guiding principles of a Type 1 Ecolabel require us to keep each of our standards relevant to today’s market, to ensure that they accurately define environmental leadership, and also to verify that the requirements are practical for certification. Our periodic assessments of each standard also include a review of the market to identify if relevant technologies and best practices have evolved. Green Seal references many external sources in our standards that make a revision necessary: ASTM and ISO update the names and criteria of their test methods; the OECD updates their suggested methods for evaluating chemicals, and the US EPA often increases the size and complexity of its environmental databases in response to newly published scientific studies. Also, the market is continuously evolving. Manufacturers are always developing new technologies and re-designing their products. For example, over the years companies have expanded their offerings of environmentally-preferable packaging. Source-reduced packaging, packaging take-back programs, and packaging made from higher percentages of post-consumer materials are being used by environmental leaders in the cleaning industry now, but were not widely available a decade ago. For our standard revisions, we note these types of changes and gauge whether an update is necessary.

Our 2016 – 2017 Standard Revision: Improving Nine Cleaning Product Standards

On November 15, we published a document with the proposed revisions to our cleaning product standards and opened the Public Comment Period. As a Type 1 Ecolabel that provides an independent and life-cycle based evaluation, we actively engage the public in our revision process. When each standard is developed, and again when each standard is revised, we widely announce a Public Comment Period. During this eight-week period (sometimes longer!), we promote our “Proposed Revisions” and request feedback from any interested individual, organization, or company.  We often receive detailed comments from product manufacturers (some with and some without Green Seal-certified products), product evaluators, advocates in public health, and experts from environmental organizations. Many individuals stay tuned in to ensure that Green Seal’s standards maintain the same level of stringency, and others chime in to make sure that our requirements describe a practical evaluation. Institutional purchasers stay involved in order to ensure that they can still depend on Green Seal-certified products as a way of obtaining their group’s sustainability goals.

…And the Comments Pour In

During the Public Comment Period, we encourage comments that directly reference our proposed revisions (nothing outside of the scope, please); comments that are science-based; a realistic viewpoint of industry; and comments that helpfully reference scientific or technical information. We have received supportive comments, neutral comments about editorial improvements or the flow of a standard, and critiques, and all help us to evaluate our proposed revisions. After we close the Public Comment Period, Green Seal publishes our “Response to Comments” document which includes each comment that was submitted through our online forum, and provides our direct reactions. Sometimes we are able to respond to each submitted comment but in some cases we provide one response to a group of comments that touch on the same issue. In our responses, we try to clearly state: Yes, the comment resulted in a change in the standard, or, No, we’re going to proceed as we originally proposed. For both cases we describe our reasoning. Sometimes, we also get in touch directly with the commenter to provide a more elaborate reaction to help them better understand our perspectives, our goals, and also to hear from them about their concerns and their reasoning. These types of conversations are greatly beneficial, and help us to stay informed on the issues and perspectives of our stakeholders.

Stay Engaged, Add Your Comment, and Encourage Feedback

Do you have expertise in the performance, or environmental and health impacts of cleaning products? Do you have a specific interest in one of our proposed revisions? We welcome you to register on our online forum and provide your comments. This is your chance to help define environmental leadership for the cleaning industry. If you do not have expertise in these topics or a strong understanding of the issues that are being proposed, but you are strongly interested in promoting environmental leadership, consider reaching out to a health or environmental organization, or to your favorite cleaning product brand, and ask them to provide their input on our proposed revisions. Our standards and certification process play a major role in reducing the environmental impacts of your state governments and schools, and help drive environmental improvements in the cleaning industry.