This week, EPA’s Safer Choice program kicks off a week-long “Spring Cleaning” public awareness campaign to bring attention to thousands of Safer Choice labelled products now appearing on retail shelves and approved for institutional use.

 
The Spring Cleaning campaign is being launched in conjunction with retailers and with Safer Choice partner organizations to educate consumersabout the meaning of the Safer Choice label on consumer and institutional products.

 
The Safer Choice program is now working with 500 partner organizations and has qualified more than 2,000 institutional and consumer products—with a broad range of cleaning home care and custodial uses—to carry the Safer Choice label. As the leading consumer and institutional product trade association representing many of those partners, the Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) works with Safer Choice to increase ingredient transparency so that users of those products know more about what’s in them.
Dozens of CSPA member companies have earned the right to display this icon on their labels after submitting products to EPA for ingredient and performance review. It is not easy to attain a Safer Choice label, and our member companies have been incentivized to innovate—reformulating some existing products and developing new ones to meet the program criteria. The result is more product options for consumers.


CSPA also supports Safer Choice by making its Consumer Products Ingredient Dictionary Guides freely available to all companies participating in the program as a tool for standardizing and defining ingredient names.


We are proud that CSPA was one of EPA’s 2015 Safer Choice Partners of the Year.We were recognized for “efforts to advance safer products among member companies and for collaborative spirit in spearheading Safer Choice’s implementation of ingredient disclosure.”Three CSPA members—Osprey Biotechnics, Stepan Company and Wexford Labs—were also recognized as Partners of the Year in the company category for their efforts to advance sustainable ingredients and formulate products to meet Safer Choice criteria.
We look forward to Spring Cleaning with Safer Choice and to the awareness it will bring to the efforts the consumer and institutional products industry is undertaking to improve ingredient transparency,


About the Author
Chris Cathcart is president and CEO of the Consumer Specialty Products Association. In this role, he initiated the formation of Product Care, the industry’s product stewardship program; the founding of the Alliance for Consumer Education, the association’s non-profit educational foundation for which he is a member of the board of trustees and serves as secretary; and established the Association’s Air Care Division, which represents air fresheners and other air care products. Under Cathcart’s leadership the Association has enjoyed a steady growth in membership and has achieved strong financial footing. www.cspa.org