“Natural” Cleaners – New Standards

February 22nd, 2010 BY nparkington | 3 Comments

You may have noticed that there are more “natural” products available at supermarkets, discount stores, and drugstores. As a consumer it is becoming more difficult to decipher which products are actually derived from renewable resources and are better for the environment. In some cases, manufacturers state that their products are made with natural ingredients when they are actually made from synthetic ingredients — that’s a prime example of greenwashing (check out http://stopgreenwash.org/ for more info on greenwashing).

There is some good news. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a Washington-based industry group, The Natural Products Association (NPA), is trying to set up some standards to help clarify what “natural” means when used to describe or label home-care products. In 2008 they set some guidelines for personal-care products and 350 products have the seal today — That seems to be working!

Only home-care products that meet the following criteria will be able to display the association’s seal:

- 95% of the ingredients, excluding water, must be derived from natural sources

- Non-natural ingredients should be used only when alternative natural ingredients are unavailable

- Cannot contain ingredients with suspected human-health risks

- The NPA will review the ingredient lists to ensure that they qualify for the seal

You may ask, why should I care? Or, what’s so bad about the cleaner I’m using today? Here are some fun (or kind of scary) facts:

- Mix bleach with many common toilet-bowl cleaners, and chlorine gas is the result. Mix it with ammonia and you’ll get chloramines gases. Both are so toxic!

- When bleach mixes with a few naturally occurring compounds, the results are carcinogenic organochlorines — the same things found in the mostly banned pesticide DDT.

- In the last fifty years roughly 75,000 chemicals have been introduced into consumer products, many in household cleaners, but less than 5% of the chemicals have been tested for health or environmental side effects.

- In 1989, the EPA estimated that fumes produced by common household cleaners were three times more likely to cause cancer than other air pollutants.

- A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine found that exposure to cleaning products accounts for 15 percent of all asthma cases.

These facts are not even tackling the issue of what they are doing to our eco-system. Choose wisely. You will probably start to see the NPA seal on approved home-care product labels in the next few months. Then again, making your own cleaning products is an option too…

(Sources – Wall Street Journal, FoxNews.com, Photo – MarthaStewart.com)

N.Parkington

nparkington | My Bio & Articles

Natalie lives in San Diego, California and enjoys a healthy organic vegetarian lifestyle (with chocolate as the exception...). She does what she can for the environment and is constantly making adjustments to become greener in all...