Phone App Product Guide — Useful While Shopping

Companies manufacturing cleaning products are not required to tell you what chemicals they use in their products. Without ingredient transparency, it’s hard for people to make safe, well-informed decisions. To help educate you about how to read labels so you can understand the potential risks in many cleaning products, Seventh Generation wants to equip you with the Label Reading Guide. Download the mobile, Mac, or Windows app, or printable PDF, and become a better ingredient detective today.

via Label Reading Guide -Cleaning Products Ingredients Information Guide -Family Health and Safety | Seventh Generation.

Wonder what FRAGRANCE really means on a label?

20 Most Common Chemicals in Perfume and Their Health Risks.

To disclose or not to disclose?

We understand you use our products around the people, pets and things you love. So naturally, you want to know what’s in them. We have extensive processes that help us formulate our products to be safe and effective when used as directed on the labels. This site offers a detailed look at the ingredients in our products so you can make the right decisions for your home.

via What’s Inside SC Johnson.

[Labeling is not mandatory for cleaning products. Products with little to hide will gladly label while others will use words like "natural" or "organic" and not label to effectively green wash you. SC Johnson is slowly joining the movement to "disclose" due to commerical pressures by announcing this webite. So far they have included only four product lines in the "Inside SC Johnson" project: Fantastick, The Fragrance Collection, Glade and Nature's Source. I find it interesting that for "fragrance" they do not list specific information in the "more detail" section. That is coming soon. Fragrances can be a combination of 500 different synthetic chemicals and are often fiercely protected by industry. They claim it's a trade secret. Fragrances often include nasty substances like toulene and styrene oxide (both carcinogenics).]

Clorox’s Green Works = Greenwashing?

This brings us to one of the other eyebrow-raisers: Clorox cheerfully lists the ingredients for Green Works on the label — something it doesn’t do for its conventional cleaners — and also prominently displays the Clorox logo. They’re hoping that the equation of “trusted brand (and the proven efficacy that comes with it) + transparency = success,” and Joel Makower thinks it’ll be a pretty big deal: “This is a kind of watershed moment. We finally have major consumer companies taking the green marketplace seriously, and not as an afterthought.” (He also did some consulting on the project).

As for the products themselves, (which include a general purpose cleaner, window cleaner, toilet bowl cleaner, dilutable cleaner and bathroom cleaner): Clorox claims that each one of the five cleaners is at least 99% natural — that’s right, the ubiquitous, unregulated “n” word — a fact which can be verified with a glance at the ingredients. Here’s the list for the all-purpose cleaner: water, alkyl polyglucoside, ethanol SDA-3C, glycerine, lemon essential oil, preservative (Kathon) and colorant (Milliken Liquitint Blue HP dye and Bright Yellow dye X); the last two — preservative and colorant — make up the circa 1% of the non-”natural” petroleum-derived portion of the cleaners (though Clorox says Kathon will biodegrade within 28 days). With a few exceptions, like the addition of sodium lauryl sulfate and lauramine oxide, the ingredients for the rest of the cleaners are mostly similar.

via Introducing Clorox’s Green Works Cleaners : TreeHugger.

[I get a lot of questions about greenwashing. This article discusses the Sierra Club's recent endorsement of the Clorox Green Works brand which raised some eyebrows. Clorox wants a piece of the green pie and they will get it since stores like Walmat (where a lot of people shop) do not offer many eco-friendly alternatives. These products are fairly OK and definitely better than the rest of the Clorox line. But I would rather not fund Clorox and save a bunch by DIY.]