Mr. Green Takes on Mr. Clean
by Stacy Mitchell

Consumers are demanding household cleaning products that are safer for the environment and their health. The demand has opened up new markets for plant-derived cleaners, which are inherently more benign than those made from petrochemicals.

Synthetic, petroleum-based surfactants and solvents first came into wide use in the 1950s. These agents were more versatile, outperformed traditional vegetable-based soaps, and quickly dominated the household cleaners market.

These new cleaning agents, however, proved to be a significant source of pollution. Cleaners represent the largest volume of hazardous substances in a typical household. Approximately 500,000 tons of liquid cleaners alone are washed down U.S. drains annually.

Thousands of petroleum-based surfactants, solvents, and other chemicals are present in these products. Some are acutely toxic. Others do not biodegrade, but rather accumulate in ecosystems and can reach levels lethal to fish and other organisms. Some are known carcinogens. Others are endocrine disrupters, which have been linked to reproductive illnesses and cancer. Some emit large doses of VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and contribute to smog. The hazards of many are relatively unknown.

Thanks to advances in carbohydrate chemistry, a variety of plant-derived surfactants and solvents are now on the market. Independent studies and consumer feedback reveal that these products work as well as, and sometimes better than, their petroleum-based counterparts. They are substantially safer for the environment. Plant-based cleaners are made from renewable resources and are generally nontoxic, biodegradable and have low VOC content.

Although the supermarket in your neighborhood may not yet stock plant-based cleaners, your local coop or natural foods store probably does. Here you’ll find cleaners containing surfactants made from coconut or palm oil, solvents made from orange rinds, and fabric softeners made from soybeans. The overall market share of vegetable-based cleaners is still quite small. Solid statistics are unavailable, but they probably represent less than 1 percent of the $11 billion U.S. market for household cleaning products. Current trends, however, are very encouraging, with the sector’s top companies reporting sales growth in the neighborhood of 20 to 100 percent annually.

Ingredient Disclosure
Buyer beware, however, when it comes to purchasing “green” cleaners. A number of cleaners on the market have eco-friendly names, but contain the same toxic components found in mainstream products. Close inspection of the label may not yield much information as cleaners are not required to disclose their ingredients. A product label might include pictures of plants or note that it contains plant-based ingredients, but, without full disclosure, consumers have no way of knowing whether these ingredients represent a small fraction of the contents or the bulk of the product.

To fully remedy this situation, policymakers will have to require that cleaning product labels, like food labels, list every ingredient. There have been sporadic attempts to do this, but mainstream cleaning products companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying to defeat these efforts. They contend that their ingredients are proprietary.

In the meantime, consumers should look for products that appear to disclose all of their ingredients. Labels on Ecover (Malle, Belgium) products note that the company discloses every ingredient and uses no petrochemicals. Ecover got its start as a soapmaking operation on a farm in the late 1970s. Today its products are found at more than 12,000 locations worldwide.

Jeff Phillips, vice president of Seventh Generation (Burlington, VT), says new labels on his company’s products will provide “the most complete disclosure of any brand.” Seventh Generation, a 10-year-old company, is the market leader in the environmentally preferable household cleaning products sector with $9 million in sales in 1998 (half of which were in its paper products division).

Most Seventh Generation products are petroleum free. Its dish liquid, for instance, contains corn and/or coconut-based surfactants, urea, salt, preservative, and natural citrus fragrance. As the new labels clearly reveal, a few of its products contain a glycol-based degreaser, which the company plans to eliminate once an effective alternative is found.

Third Party Certification
So what’s butyl cellosolve? Is it more or less safe for the environment than d-limonene? Given that few consumers will be armed with enough information to evaluate many of the ingredients used in cleaning products, a third party certification and eco-labeling system is needed. (Butyl cellosolve is a synthetic solvent and neurotoxin found in all-purpose cleaners. D-limonene is an effective natural solvent made from a renewable resource, orange rinds.)

Green Seal (Washington, DC) offers third party certification for a variety of products, including both household and institutional cleaners. The products undergo a battery of laboratory tests and must meet some three dozen criteria. The criteria are determined through a public review process. They cover both the performance of the product and a life cycle analysis that considers the product’s environmental impact from manufacture through use and disposal.

Few household cleaning products have the Green Seal, not because they do not qualify, but because of the expense involved. Companies must pay for the lab tests and a $7500 fee to cover Green Seal’s administrative costs (companies with less than $1 million in annual sales qualify for a reduced fee of $500). Don Eby of The Clean Environment Company (Lincoln, NE) says the fee was out of reach for his small company, especially when few of his customers recognize or request the Green Seal.

It’s a chicken and egg problem. Without consumer demand for the label, companies are reluctant to undertake the expense. But without products bearing the label, few consumers will recognize or look for the Green Seal. Other countries have had more success to date with eco-labeling. The Blue Angel, for example, is recognized by 78 percent of German consumers and is found on many cleaning products.

Green Seal provides an alternative through its Choose Green Reports, which use company surveys rather than lab tests to evaluate products. For household cleaners, the report offers shopping tips on what to avoid and a list of “Green Buys.” To qualify, a product must, among other things, contain no petrochemicals, phosphates, or chlorine bleach (sodium hypochlorite).

Another option for consumers is to look for products that have passed review by a government agency. Increasingly, government purchasers are using environmental criteria when choosing cleaning products. The level of stringency varies widely, however. Standards for federal purchasers developed jointly by the U.S. General Services Administration and major cleaning products manufacturers, for instance, are very weak.

Others set the bar quite high. Santa Monica, California, requires products to meet strict standards on such items as aquatic toxicity and VOC content. Consumers can obtain a list of selected products from the city. Unfortunately, the companies producing cleaners for retail and those making products for institutional use are not always the same. An all-purpose cleaner from Mamco International (Moraga, CA) and a number of products from Naturally Yours (Springfield, MO) made the cut in Santa Monica, for instance, but are only available at a limited number of retail outlets. (For contact information for Green Seal and the City of Santa Monica, see Book Shelf/Web Shelf in this issue, page 15.)

A Consumer’s Pipe Dream:
A Graduated Eco-labeling Scheme
Consumers often seek “safe” cleaning products, but these substances, by their very nature and purpose, are aggressive agents. Vinegar, for instance, makes a great glass cleaner and is an environmentally sound choice when used sparingly, but a large quantity discharged into an ecosystem or ingested can have deadly results.

Cleaners therefore cannot be classified as either safe or not safe. Instead, they are more or less environmentally preferable. At the low end of this range are cleaners that are entirely petroleum derived, do not readily biodegrade, and contain highly toxic or carcinogenic components. At the high end are products that are almost entirely vegetable derived, perhaps with some mineral content. The middle includes petroleum-based products that are biodegradable and less toxic, as well as a group of cleaners that contain both plant and petroleum components.

To encompass this range of preferability, an ecolabeling system would need to be graduated, rather than a yes or no approval process. Ecover has proposed such a system for Europe. After rejecting the European Community’s new ecolabel for being too lenient and lumping together products that have varying degrees of environmental impact, Ecover suggested instead a five-star rating scheme.

This would allow products that are safer than the norm to receive recognition (one or two stars, for instance), while still distinguishing these from the most environmentally preferable (five stars). Unlike a straight stamp of approval, a graduated system encourages companies that have a few stars to improve the environmental performance of their products in order to gain more stars. The system also gives consumers a more complete set of options. If the five-star stain remover, for instance, is too expensive, then they can choose one with fewer stars and still avoid the most harmful products.

Cost Per Use vs. Price Tag
Retail prices for green cleaners vary widely. Many are comparable to mainstream products. Others are more expensive, partly due to the smaller scale of manufacture and partly because petrochemical surfactants are cheaper than their plant-based alternatives. The gap has narrowed over the last few years, however, as demand and production expand.

Because environmentally preferable products are often sold in concentrate to avoid excess packaging, consumers should consider the cost per use rather than cost per bottle. A 64-ounce bottle of Restore the Earth (made by Safe & Clean of Shoreview, MN) liquid laundry detergent costs $16, or four times as much as 64 ounces of Tide. But the Restore the Earth detergent will wash 64 loads, compared to 16 for Tide. John Vlahaca of Earth Friendly Products (Winnetka, IL) notes that not only will his laundry detergent wash more loads (25 vs. 16), but it includes a soybean-based fabric softener, which normally would be purchased separately.

Other Tips for Going Green
Be wary of the term “biodegradable.” One of the ways mainstream cleaning products companies have attempted to address the ecological concerns of their customers is to include this term on their labels. They are probably referring to only a portion of the ingredients and how readily these components degrade is not indicated. Plant-based ingredients generally biodegrade in a relatively short period of time. Some companies now indicate this on the label (e.g., 95 percent of the product will biodegrade in 3-5 days.)

Products that meet a certain level of toxicity must by law be labeled “Caution,” “Warning,” or “Danger.” Choose products that either say Caution or carry none of these labels. Warning and Danger are the highest levels of toxicity and should be avoided.

Give priority to replacing the most hazardous types of cleaners: toilet bowl cleaners, oven cleaners, stain removers and furniture polish. Environmentally preferable alternatives are available. Earth Friendly Products offers a toilet bowl cleaner made from cedar oil, citric acid, xanthan gum and coconut-derived surfactant. Restore the Earth markets a furniture polish made with d-limonene in a silicone solution. Several companies offer effective stain removers that rely on natural enzymes to digest odors and stains.

Debbie Raphael, who helped develop Santa Monica’s cleaners program and now works for the city of San Francisco, says that if you change only one thing about your buying habits, avoid cleaners that contain pesticides (disinfectants or antibacterial soaps), which are by design acutely toxic. If you absolutely need a disinfectant, choose a product made only for this purpose. Because of the way in which they are typically used, cleaners that contain a disinfectant do not actually disinfect anything, but may make the problem worse by encouraging the growth of resistant strains of bacteria.

Availability
Green cleaners have fully penetrated the natural foods store market, a rapidly growing segment that has accounts for much of the overall growth of environmentally preferable cleaners. But finding space on traditional supermarket shelves has proved more difficult.

Store managers and consumers are still skeptical about the performance of environmentally preferable cleaning products. The first generation of these products were in fact inferior and despite a growing record of comparable or even superior performance, green products continue to struggle against a bad reputation.

After decades of using petrochemical products, consumers expect household cleaners to look and smell a certain way. Don Eby of The Clean Environment Company offers an anecdote to illustrate this problem. He gave a potential purchaser two bottles of glass cleaner. Both contained identical formulations, but one was dyed blue. The purchaser returned and reported that the clear product failed his test, but the blue product was one of the most effective glass cleaners he had ever used.

Compared to the giant chemical companies they compete with, green cleaning companies are tiny and struggle to build brand recognition. “We operate on a completely different scale,” says John Vlahaca of Earth Friendly Products, “What we sell in a year, [Proctor & Gamble] will spend on an ad campaign.” The competition for supermarket shelf space is fierce and slotting fees are frequently required to obtain a spot. Big budgets and brand name clout give the large companies the best and biggest sections of the aisle. Green cleaners, if a store agrees to stock them, often must compete for limited display on the bottom shelf.

If your supermarket doesn’t stock green cleaners, gives them limited space, or carries products that have green labels but toxic contents, talk to the manager. Environmentally preferable products are also widely available online and through catalogs.

A publication of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance