Cleaning Products Coming Clean - What Really Is In Windex?

Sure, we all know what is in Windex. Right? Isopropanol, 2-Butoxyethanol, Ethylene glycol n-hexyl ether, Water, and Ammonia. Well, now you can go to a new web site set up by S.C. Johnson & Son Inc. called www.WhatsInsideSCJohnson.com to describe most of the ingredients for its Windex cleaner, as well as for its Glade, and Shout brands.

The company is part of a recent trend. Other manufacturers of household cleaning products have begun disclosing the chemicals in some of their products. For example, Clorox Co. lists ingredients for its Formula 409 and other products at TheCloroxCompany.com. Seventh Generation Inc., which has long disclosed most of the ingredients for its eco-friendly cleaning products, last year started explaining chemical names in terms that consumers can better understand on its labels. And Procter & Gamble Co. plans to list its ingredients online and describe them in consumer friendly terms.

S.C. Johnson announced in March that they would disclose the ingredients in all of its home cleaning and air cleaning products. If you go to the S.C. Johnson site, for example, you can see the breakdown of its Windex Outdoor Multisurface Cleaner in terms of what each chemical does. Mostly it is Water, of course, but also listed are: 2-(8-Methylnonoxy) Ethanol (Cleaning Agent), Sodium Xylene Sulfonate (Wetting Agent), Sodium Citrate (Stabilizer), and Sodium Carbonate (pH Balancer). The plan to disclose ingredients includes products with fragrances, which generally have been closely guarded trade secrets. Other companies are less sure about doing this, because it is confidential business information; they would prefer a general category called "fragrances, dyes and preservatives." But S.C. Johnson says they prefer the "palate approach" that would give consumers all the information they need to make choices.

The move is not purely altruistic. Consumers have been asking for more information on ingredients in terms they can understand. So in a sense, companies are responding to market pressures. But they are also responding to pressure from advocacy groups who are pressing for greater disclosure. Environmental Working Group, for example, has been visibly campaigning against the use of phthalates in products, and this disclosure will make their use more obvious (and thus likely increase demand for their removal). While both FDA and European regulators have approved the use of phthalates and the industry says they are safe, personal care products are being forced by public insecurity to reformulate their products. Other groups are also pressuring industry to list all their ingredients. A lawsuit filed in February by EarthJustice on behalf of several environmental groups seeks to force Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt-Benckiser (makers of Woolite), and Church and Dwight (makers of Arm and Hammer products) to list all of their ingredients.

All of this ties in with other programs that seek greater disclosure of ingredients and their health and safety, such as REACH in the EU and TSCA reform in the US and worldwide Ecolabelling efforts. California's development of a new "Green Initiative" will also exert pressure to both disclose their ingredients and show that they are safe. Those companies that lead the way will likely gain market share as consumers more and more focus on products they feel are more sustainable.

These efforts are receiving a boost from industry trade groups that recently set up joint guidelines to encourage use of a standardized format for presenting the technical information. "Consumers want to know more to ensure the safety of their family," says a Procter & Gamble spokesman. "The industry is changing along with that."

Chemical Control Reform - Kids Safe Out...ChAMP In?

As discussed here previously, the US is taking a hard look at its 30+ year old chemical control law, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). Many argue that the law is outdated, both because it doesn't require health and safety data for new chemical notifications and because the bar for regulating existing chemicals seems too high a hurdle. Around 63,000 existing chemicals were grandfathered onto the TSCA Inventory with no health and safety review, and only a handful have seen such reviews since.

Options abound. Should the US pursue a system more like the new chemical control law in Europe, called REACH, which requires that manufacturers and importers of all chemicals - existing and new - provide a dossier summarizing health and safety for all intended uses? Or something more like the Canadian prioritization review and management program in which the government does the hard work of the initial screen for all existing chemicals? Or something like the Kid Safe Chemical Act that has twice been introduced by the US Congress before?

This week at the annual GlobalChem chemical industry conference being held in Baltimore, MD, Jim Jones, EPA's acting toxics and pesticides chief, told attendees at the GlobalChem chemical industry conference in Baltimore, that at the office's first meeting with new EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, she told staff that “‘ChAMP is fine, but I want to see more, more quickly.’”

ChAMP is the current semi-authorized by TSCA mechanism that EPA has been using to maximize the value of the reams of data received under the voluntary HPV Challenge program between 1998 and 2008. But ChAMP goes further, with proposed enhancements that would "reset" the TSCA Inventory, look at moderate volume chemicals, and inorganic high production volume chemicals that were excluded from the original HPA Challenge.

Jones' comments signal that EPA may be leaning toward TSCA Reform that mirrors more the ChAMP program than the Kid Safe Act. Environmental and health advocacy groups have favored the Kid Safe Act because it puts the onus on producing data on the manufacturers of chemicals, similar to REACH in the EU. Industry favors something more like ChAMP, which initially would require more Agency effort during the screening process, but may provide for a quicker review and prioritization. Once chemicals are prioritized for more in-depth review, industry would provide specific data focused on addressing any real or perceived concerns.

Jackson has hinted on more than one occasion since taking office that she favors the current chemical management system as a basis for reforming the program. The ChAMP program was initiated following former President Bush's commitment to complete the characterizations of Inventory chemicals by 2012 as part of the 2007 Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement with Mexican and Canadian officials.

Officially though, the administration has not yet taken a position on TSCA reform, but Jones suggests that "the administrator is “very interested” in the issue and has discussed the issue “with her small political team several times.” Meanwhile, EPA will continue to use its existing TSCA authorities to regulate substances that are of concern. While Congress is mulling the future of TSCA, EPA has been more assertive in using such TSCA authorized tools as test rules and enforcement actions. It also has been very busy reviewing the data received from the HPV Challenge and issuing hazard and risk prioritizations.

USEPA Offers "Strategic Plan" for Evaluating the Toxicity of Chemicals

This week the USEPA released a "Strategic Plan for Evaluating the Toxicity of Chemicals," which departs from "the traditional risk assessment approach that relies heavily on data generated through the intentional dosing of experimental animals." As most people know, animal welfare issues have led to a desire to find non-animal testing methods. At the same time there is pressure to provide data that adequately characterizes the hazards and risks of industrial and consumer chemicals.

According to EPA, while the traditional approach

"has provided EPA with sound science to support regulatory decision making over the past several decades, EPA must address ever-increasing demands, including consideration of complex issues such as cumulative exposures, life-stage vulnerabilities, and genetic susceptibilities, not to mention the increasing number of chemicals and cost of toxicity testing. A new approach is proposed to address these demands, an approach based on the application of advances in molecular biology and computational sciences to transform toxicity testing and risk assessment practices."

Based on a 2007 report by the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies, "Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: a Vision and a Strategy," an Agency workgroup coordinated to produce the new Strategic Plan that "focuses on identifying and evaluating "toxicity pathways," i.e., cellular response pathways responsible for adverse health effects when sufficiently perturbed by environmental agents under realistic exposure conditions."

While EPA expects that the new paradigm will "create more efficient and cost-effective means to screen and prioritize for further assessment the tens of thousands of chemicals that are already found in the environment," there is some question as to whether that expectation is realistic. For example, I see four major challenges.

1) Developing and validating the methodologies: Development of new methods generally takes many iterations to determine the conditions that provide the most information with reliability and repeatability. Thus, it will likely be quite a few years before the methods being developed can be used for decision-making. Can we wait that long?

2) Translating expressions of exposure at the gene, protein, molecular, and cellular levels to the target organ and organism level: Whereas a standard animal study provides easily interpretable and accepted measures of toxicity (e.g., death, loss of body weight, reduced reproduction), the new methods provide much more nuanced results whose toxicological significance may be very difficult to establish. These subtle responses may simply be adaptive rather than result in diminished capacity.

3) Communicating why this is better than the current QSAR-based screening methods: The new methods will serve only as screening tools for prioritizing chemicals for further review. Ultimately the final risk management decision-making may still be based on the established standard testing methods. EPA will need to explain why these new screening level methods are better than the current US approach to screening chemicals. This may be especially difficult given that a Canadian prioritization program reviewed the 23,000 chemicals on its existing chemicals inventory based largely on existing study data and QSAR analysis.

4) Funding: The 2007 NRC report “Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century” suggested that transitioning into this new computational, informational, and molecular-based strategy would require $100M in funding every year for a period of 10-20 years. Given the current economic situation and competing issues such as climate change, TSCA reform, green chemistry, endocrine disruption, and others, it is hard to imagine that adequate funding can be made available for this endeavor.

Revisiting the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976

I have noted previously that there is a big push in this Congress to take a long hard look at the current chemical control regulations in the United States. Well, on Thursday, February 26, 2009 the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection held a hearing on "Revisiting the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.” The hearing was designed to address the perception of critical gaps in the statute and explore how those gaps might hinder effective chemical safety policy in the United States.

The following witnesses, spanning a range of government, advocacy, and industry groups, all testified:

John Stephenson, Director, Natural Resources and the Environment, Government Accountability Office

J. Clarence Davies, Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future (Former EPA Assistant Administrator for Policy in the George H.W. Bush Administration)

Maureen Swanson, Healthy Children Project Coordinator, Learning Disabilities Association of America

Cecil Corbin-Mark, Deputy Director/Director for Policy Initiatives, WE ACT For Environmental Justice (West Harlem Environmental Action)

Michael Wright, Director of Health and Safety, United Steelworkers

Richard Denison, Senior Scientist, Environmental Defense Fund

Kathy Gerwig, Vice President, Workplace Safety and Environmental Stewardship Officer, Kaiser Permanente

Cal Dooley, President and CEO, American Chemistry Council

V.M. DeLisi, President, Fanwood Chemical, Inc., Chairman, International Affairs Committee, Synthetic Organic Chemical Manufacturers Association

Charles T. Drevna, President, National Petrochemical & Refiners Association

A link to the written testimony and video of the Subcommittee can be found on the Committee web site.

International Calls for Global Database on Toxins in Products

I've mentioned information systems and databases previously. This past week in Geneva, Switzerland there was a call from an international body for a broader database of chemicals in products such as clothes, toys, jewelry, and electronics. The idea would be to have a uniform information system to help governments, businesses, and consumers reduce the risks to hazardous substances.

These calls came out of a United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) workshop designed to set a framework for the second International Conference on Chemicals Management (ICCM2). And ICCM2, which occurs in May, will review the status of the UN Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM). I haven't mentioned SAICM much in this blog, but will likely be doing so more in the future. After many years of discussions by most of the world's nations, SAICM was officially established in 2006 as a framework to "achieve sound management of chemicals" worldwide.

Opening the workshop, the director general of the Swedish Chemicals Agency, Ethel Forsberg, said "As a consumer I want to buy products anywhere in the world that will not pose a risk to my family or be a problem to dispose of, but information on the chemical content of products very rarely exists - even if they contain hazardous substances."

As internet technology has advanced, scientists have contributed substantial data on chemicals and related issues to information systems and databases that are available online. Having access to the information is a good first step. However, most scientific data are not readily understood by the general public, and thus it seems necessary to also look at ways to digest and communicate the information in more meaningful ways. In my opinion, making this jump to the next level in a transparent and unbiased way is needed to avoid having the now accessible data misused by those advocating one position or another.

The Future of Geography = Online Gaming?

There is no secret that the US has lagged behind on science, math, and geography. It seems every month there is someone doing a survey in which Americans can't identify whether names given are cities or countries, never mind where they might be in the world (or even in the states). Do we know the difference between Iran and Iraq? Can we find East Timor on a map? How about Somalia? Or more specifically, Mogadishu? How can we take action in places like Darfur if we don't even know whether it is a city, a region, or a country (or where in the world is Sudan)?

So how do we improve our geography skills? How do we stack up against other people in the world?

One way is to travel everywhere in the world. I'm doing what I can in that regard, but at 17 countries I'm hitting less than 10% of the nations on the planet so that doesn't seem like a viable option. We could also study maps and take lots of tests, but we all know how much most of us like doing that.

Geosense offers another option...one that takes advantage of our natural tendency to want to play online games. Geosense lets you play alone, or do real-time head-to-head challenges with people from all around the world. You can play with an interactive map of the world, an advanced map, just Europe, or just the US. You can even scramble it all over.

You'll be shown a series of city names. Depending on your map choice, a state or country name is also included. All you have to do is click the city's location on the map. If you play against others you will see your pick and their pick (as well as the correct pick). So there is pressure not only to know where the location is but to find and click on it faster than your opponent. Accuracy and timing add up as points.

Will it work? Will students (and their parents) get into the game and maybe learn a thing or two? I think it will help. We tend to be glued to our computers so why not take advantage of it to learn some geography.

Check out Geosense and let me know. It can be quite addictive.