Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Environmental Working Group (EWG) questions 'safe' labels on household cleaning products

The environmental activist organization, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a new report, “Cleaners Hall of Shame” that alleges many household cleaners marked as "safe" or "natural" actually contain potentially harmful chemicals.  The report is yet another in a series of reports by this group that ignores basic risk assessment principles and instead grounds its allegations primarily on hazard information, with little or no consideration given to exposure.

In a statement released by the American Cleaning Institute (ACI), Brain Sansoni, ACI Vice President of Communication, said he was "disappointed" with the "outrageous new publicity campaign" from the Environmental Working Group (EWG).  Sansoni stated that “[c]leaning products play an essential role in our daily lives,” and that EWG “distorts the science and research about product and ingredient safety."

The report completely ignores the "enormous amount of resources that are dedicated to assuring the safety of products, including many millions of dollars in research, development and testing before products ever hit the shelves," Sanosoni said, adding that the report also disregards three key words present on cleaning products: Use as directed.

ACI added that "instead of sending out fundraising pitches that coarsen the public dialogue over product safety, interest groups should help focus attention on the great deal of information that is already publicly available on cleaning products and their ingredients. The public interest would be better served by dialogue rather than baseless attacks."  I couldn’t agree more.

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This guest post was provided by Patrick J. Donnelly, AOCS Chief Executive Officer. Thank you Pat for writing and thank you for reading.

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1 comment:

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