Written on: May 9, 2016 by SprayTM
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today named the Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) a winner of its 2016 Safer Choice Partner of the Year award. Eight member companies of the trade association were also recognized as Partners of the Year by the Safer Choice Program.
The Safer Choice Program is aimed at identifying alternative chemistries and chemicals for use in consumer and institutional products through a labeling initiative. Companies voluntarily submit detailed product ingredient information to the EPA for review against a set of criteria to earn the right to use the “Safer Choice” logo on their products. The 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 use the Safer Choice label. 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.
“As the leading consumer and institutional product trade association representing a number of Safer Choice partners, we are working with the program to increase ingredient transparency so that users of those products know more about what’s in them,” said Chris Cathcart, CSPA President and CEO. “We congratulate the eight CSPA member companies named 2016 Safer Choice Partners of the Year.” CSPA members honored include: BASF, Bissell, Clean Control, Clorox, Ecolab, Osprey, RB and Virox.
Cathcart said the program has benefits for both consumers and businesses because household and institutional products makers are incentivized to innovate – reformulating some existing products and developing new ones that will meet Safer Choice program criteria.
CSPA also supports Safer Choice by making its Consumer Products Ingredient Dictionary Guides available to all companies participating in the program as a tool for standardizing and defining ingredient names. CSPA was recognized for “its efforts in developing a dictionary that, among other attributes, highlights chemicals that have met Safer Choice safer chemical criteria.” Safer Choice also acknowledged CSPA’s collaborative spirit and engagement of stakeholders, praising its efforts to register antimicrobial products in the “Design for the Environment (DfE) Antimicrobial Pesticide Pilot Project.”
CSPA established its own voluntary consumer product ingredient communications program and worked with the EPA as it developed its ingredient communication requirements in the original Design for the Environment program. Both the EPA DfE and the CSPA voluntary ingredient communication programs were acknowledged by Walmart as the two recommended guides for ingredient disclosure in its 2014 Policy on Sustainable Chemistry in Consumables.
CSPA is one of 24 Safer Choice 2016 Partner of the Year award winners announced by the EPA. These award winners represent a wide variety of leadership organizations, such as Fortune 500 companies, small- and medium-sized businesses, state governments, and non-governmental organizations. The 2016 Safer Choice Partner of the Year Awards will be presented during a public ceremony on May 9 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, DC.
More on the 2016 Safer Choice Partner of the Year award winners can be found here.
For the official EPA press release click here.
