Here, I’ll break down what’s in this new standard and why it matters for brands and buyers. 

Why did Green Seal develop a new standard for sanitary paper? 

Green Seal has long been a top certifier of eco-friendly 100% recycled towel and tissue products. In fact, Green Seal-certified products from leading brands saved 8.5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions last year — the emissions equivalent of taking 2 million cars off the road.  

Now, for the first time, we have added a certification pathway for tree-free alternatives. This means that brands that produce responsibly sourced bamboo sanitary paper can verify their sustainability achievement.  

We also strengthened our criteria for chemical ingredients, manufacturing processes, and packaging materials to reflect what true leadership looks like for towel and tissue products today. 

How did Green Seal develop this standard? 

We developed the standard with extensive research into the environmental and human health impacts of producing and using towel and tissue products. We also sought expertise from the technical and subject matter experts on our Sanitary Paper Products Working Group, which comprises representatives from retailers, industry associations, environmental advocates, manufacturers, and buyers.  

As always, we released our draft standard for public review and comment before finalizing it.  

What’s in the sanitary paper standard? 

The standard defines sustainability leadership in this product category as meeting the following criteria: 

• Responsible Sourcing: Products are made from 100% recycled content or responsibly sourced alternative fibers (such as agricultural residue or bamboo) that achieve substantial savings in carbon emissions and protect ancient and endangered forests. 

• Safer Chemicals: Products use chlorine-free bleaching (for recycled products) or elemental chlorine-free bleaching (for alternative fiber products) and are made without fragrances, PFAS, and other harmful chemicals. 

• Low-Impact Manufacturing: Products are manufactured with reduced water and energy use at a facility with a commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The manufacturer provides a safe and hygienic workplace, fair wages and working conditions, and ensures freedom from discrimination and harassment. 

• Sustainable Packaging: Products use recyclable or minimized packaging.  

What makes Green Seal’s standard different from others? 

Two things make our certification standard different from others. First, our standard ensures that Green Seal-certified products never contain any virgin tree fiber. They either use 100% recycled fiber, or they use alternative fiber like bamboo. This means they save more carbon and provide greater protection to ancient and endangered forests than products that earn certifications that allow the use of virgin tree fiber.  

Second, our certification standard moves beyond fiber content to require sustainability leadership across the product lifecycle.  

This is the first comprehensive sustainability standard for bamboo tissue products. Like fiber-only certification standards, it requires bamboo fibers to be sourced from responsibly managed forests. But it also requires: 

• fiber analysis testing to ensure supply chain integrity; 

• low-impact manufacturing practices; 

• safer chemical ingredients, and  

• responsible packaging. 

Meeting this standard is a differentiator for brands that are truly committed to sustainability leadership. 

Why is sustainability important in this product category? 

Americans consume an average total of 19.2 billion pounds a year of sanitary paper products, and these single-use products leave a hefty environmental footprint.  

Sanitary paper production contributes heavily to deforestation, denuding 28 million acres of the ecologically valuable Boreal forest in a 20-year period – an area roughly the size of Ohio.  

Also, converting virgin wood into pulp is an extremely energy-intensive process. Papermaking is the third-largest energy consuming manufacturing sector, after chemicals and petroleum and coal products. In fact, products made from virgin tree fiber can generate three times as many CO₂ emissions as products made from other types of pulp.  

Making paper from virgin tree fiber also guzzles massive amounts of water, demanding more than 24 billion gallons a day. 

Choosing Green Seal-certified sanitary paper products is a simple way to reduce your carbon footprint and protect precious natural resources.  

Where can people learn more about the standard? 

As a mission-driven, nonprofit organization, we always make our standards publicly available. You can find the full standard here, and you can find certified products in our certified product directory.

Sanitary paper products, including toilet paper, towels, and facial tissue, are daily essentials. The U.S. consumes approximately 19.2 billion pounds of them annually – roughly 56 pounds per person. But as single-use products made from virgin tree fiber, they can carry a hefty environmental footprint.  

That’s why we’re proposing a leadership standard for sanitary paper products that contain no virgin tree fiber and meet meaningful manufacturing and packaging sustainability requirements.   

Green Seal has long recognized manufacturing leaders that use 100% recycled fiber. Now, we’re adding a certification pathway for tree-free products like those made from bamboo. This will expand opportunities for brands that produce responsibly sourced alternative-fiber sanitary paper to verify their sustainability leadership and give consumers more certified choices in this product category.  

A High-Impact Product Category 

The fiber composition of sanitary paper products has a significant impact on their overall environmental footprint.  

Making these products with virgin tree fiber heavily contributes to deforestation, denuding 28 million acres of the ecologically valuable Boreal forest in a 20-year period – an area roughly the size of Ohio. 

Converting virgin wood into pulp is an extremely energy-intensive process. Papermaking is the third-largest energy consuming manufacturing sector, after chemicals and petroleum and coal products. In fact, products made from virgin tree fiber can generate three times as many CO₂ emissions as products made from other types of pulp. Making paper from virgin tree fiber also guzzles massive amounts of water, demanding more than 24 billion gallons a day.  

Reducing the Impacts of an Everyday Product 

Using recycled or alternative fiber significantly reduces the carbon and water impacts of producing sanitary paper products and eliminates their impact on deforestation.  

By meeting stringent fiber sourcing and manufacturing criteria, Green Seal-certified sanitary paper products save an average of 30.5 billion gallons of water and 11.7 million metric tons of CO2 emissions a year – the equivalent of taking 2.8 million cars off the road.  

Under our new standard, Green Seal will: 

• Verify products use no virgin tree fiber 

• Validate significant savings in carbon pollution and water use 

• Confirm a product is made without fragrances, PFAS, or any other harmful chemicals 

Buyers trust Green Seal-certified sanitary paper products because they significantly reduce carbon emissions, protect ancient and endangered forests, and preserve water resources. Our new standard maintains this leadership bar while growing market impact by inviting a broader group of manufacturers to verify their sustainability achievement. 

Lend us your voice 

We believe a collaborative approach leads to better outcomes for everyone. We developed our draft standard in collaboration with the leading towel and tissue brands, purchasers and policy advocates in our Working Group to promote industry alignment on meaningful claims and criteria for this product category.  

We want to hear from you too. We are accepting public comment on our proposed criteria for sanitary paper products through April 28, 2025. 

Learn more and submit your comment here. 

We’re actively recruiting qualified applicants to join our volunteer committees to help us define the core elements of safer, more sustainable products. Industry alignment on these elements is the first step toward achieving a common definition and forming a meaningful, marketable category of safer and more sustainable everyday products.

The Initiative

We’re launching a collaborative initiative with retailers, brands, and policy advocates to develop a market-led health and environmental product rating based on the core elements of a green product: safer chemicals, sustainable packaging, responsible sourcing, and low-impact manufacturing.

Research consistently shows that confusion and skepticism around sustainability claims drives a big gap between the number of shoppers who say they want eco-conscious products and the number who buy them. Developing a common framework for meaningful health and sustainability claims will build consumer trust, simplify purchasing decisions, and drive clear and consistent standards throughout the value chain.

Industry practitioners and advocates have the potential to drive significant impact for this initiative through their guidance and insight.

Call for Applicants

Apply to join our volunteer committees and help us define the core elements of safer, more sustainable products. Participants will bring both market and technical perspectives to the development of category-specific criteria and claims in:

• cleaning & laundry care
• personal care & cosmetics
• towel & tissue
• home restoration products

Selected members should expect to contribute a few hours a month to activities such as attending meetings, reviewing documents, or providing feedback.

If you are interested in participating in our committees, please apply by March 19, 2025.

At Green Seal, we are committed to eliminating per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from the supply chain for consumer products. In our latest action to prevent any more harm from these toxic “forever chemicals,” we are proposing to prohibit any PFAS in Green Seal-certified paints and coatings, floor care products, adhesives, and degreasers.

Green Seal is among the first eco-certifiers to enact an aggressive ingredient prohibition that addresses PFAS as an entire chemical class. We define PFAS as a chemical with one or more fully fluorinated carbon atoms – the most expansive definition, encompassing more than 14,000 chemicals and mirroring the definition used by regulatory bodies in the European Union and several U.S. states.

This means both manufacturers and consumers can be confident that Green Seal-certified products are formulated without any PFAS.

The update to our criteria for these product categories follows a similar update to our criteria for cleaning and personal care products, which we finalized in 2022.

Fewer than 1% of 14,000-plus PFAS have completed hazard assessments to date, meaning it could be years before these chemicals are properly evaluated for the risks they pose. However, a growing body of scientific evidence points to the need to treat PFAS as a single class because of the known hazards of the chemicals studied so far. We are tracking the emerging science and taking a leadership position on PFAS because of the extraordinary risk they pose to human health and the environment.

The hazards of PFAS 

PFAS are a group of synthetic chemicals that have been used in consumer products since the 1950s. Manufacturers prize these chemicals because their carbon-fluorine bonds make them very stable and effective at repelling oil, water, and heat. However, this unique chemical structure also makes them resistant to degradation, meaning they persist in the environment as so-called “forever chemicals” and bioaccumulate in our bodies.

PFAS are now found in drinking water and in the blood of most people around the world. They are linked to numerous adverse health effects, including cancer, reproductive harm, and decreased immune response.

PFAS in building restoration products

PFAS frequently are used as functional ingredients in building restoration products.

A recent study found that half of tested paint products contain PFAS, which may be used for glossiness, to reduce peeling, or for stain resistance or water repellency.

Most acrylic and wax floor finishes on the market contain PFAS as leveling and wetting agents, and PFAS also are used to increase wettability in adhesives.

Several U.S. states have developed measures to restrict PFAS in consumer products. While many of these measures target PFAS in personal care products, Maine, Washington, and Oregon are scheduled to implement restrictions on PFAS in certain building restoration products in coming years.

Lend us your voice

We believe a collaborative approach leads to better outcomes for everyone. That’s why we follow an open and transparent process for developing our science-based criteria that includes seeking input from industry, health and environmental researchers and advocates, consumers, and the public.

We are accepting public comment through December 20, 2024, on our proposed criteria to prohibit PFAS in our standards for paints and coatings, adhesives, and degreasers.

Learn more and submit your comment here.

Green Seal is proposing a certification standard for trash bags and can liners to recognize products that use less virgin plastic while maintaining top performance.

This standard introduces the new concept of plastic efficiency, which prioritizes the result – curbing virgin plastic use – over the method used to achieve it. While traditionally trash bags are deemed environmentally preferable for incorporating post-consumer recycled (PCR) content, this new model opens a second pathway to recognize products that use innovative technology to produce thinner liners that maintain tear and puncture resistance.

A High-Impact Single-Use Product 

As single-use plastic products, trash bags and can liners have significant environmental impacts. American households consume more than a billion trash bags each year, sending them on to landfills where they turn into microplastics that further pollute the environment. An estimated 79% of all plastic products eventually reach the ocean, harming marine life and emitting the potent greenhouse gas methane when they degrade 

Trash bags and can liners have significant carbon pollution impacts on the front end too – they generally are made of virgin plastics that are produced using considerable amounts of energy and associated carbon emissions. In fact, over 95% of the carbon footprint of plastics comes from its production.

Extracting and manufacturing resources for plastic production can also produce harmful chemicals that have human health impacts, particularly on industry workers and neighboring communities. These chemicals have been associated with a variety of negative health outcomes, including impacts on development, reproduction, and the nervous system. 

Reducing Impacts by Using Less Virgin Plastic 

Currently, there are no alternatives that perform as well as plastic trash bags and can liners for strength, odor control, and sanitation. While non-conventional plastics such as bio-based, biodegradable, or compostable plastics are marketed as sustainable alternatives, they currently are not effective solutions due to a lack of recycling and composting infrastructure, improper consumer use and, in the case of bio-based plastics, land use and emissions concerns associated with growing crops to produce the materials.

However, there is a more sustainable solution: plastic trash bags can be made with less virgin plastic without sacrificing performance. 

Incorporating post-consumer recycled (PCR) content into a trash bag reduces plastic pollution by giving a second life to used plastic films that would otherwise end up in landfills or the ocean. It also reduces the carbon impact of trash bags by eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions associated with extracting and manufacturing new virgin material and avoids emissions from incinerating plastic waste.

Several state and federal purchasing policies require trash bags to contain 10% PCR content, and demand for PCR content in plastic products and in packaging is growing among states, industry, and advocacy organizations.

However, PCR content alone may not be an effective way to identify products that reduce virgin plastic use. A Green Seal analysis of products in the marketplace found that bags that feature PCR content sometimes still incorporate the same amount of virgin plastic as their PCR-free competitors. Additionally, challenges with recycling plastic films can make sourcing high-quality PCR content difficult for manufacturers: plastic films are not typically collected in curbside collection programs and can damage recycling equipment at traditional recycling facilities. Some can liner types, such as those made from HDPE resins below 0.4 mil, also struggle to incorporate any PCR content without compromising performance.

Another way for manufacturers to reduce the amount of virgin plastic in trash bags is through using technological advancements to produce liners that are thinner but maintain uncompromising performance. In a Green Seal analysis, thin liners produced fewer greenhouse gas emissions than thicker liners, even in some cases where thicker liners incorporated PCR content. Manufacturers can also take advantage of mineral additives to reduce their use of virgin plastic and provide more strength to the bag.

Plastic Efficiency: A New Approach to Environmental Leadership 

Through an extensive market analysis, Green Seal has developed a program to recognize environmental leadership in trash bags and can liners based on plastic efficiency: reducing virgin plastic use to the minimum amount required to maintain top performance for the product’s gallon size.

This approach opens a pathway to recognize products that use leadership levels of recycled content, but also those that use innovative technologies to produce thinner liners that still maintain a trash bag’s important functional attributes of tear and puncture resistance. The result is a clear designation for buyers that a bag is in the top 30% in its size category for the lowest amount of virgin plastic in the liner, and thus the least amount of greenhouse gas emissions and plastic waste. 

The draft standard includes: 

• Verifying product functional performance through tests for puncture and tear resistance
• Requiring a minimum amount of 10% verified post-consumer recycled content for bags above 0.7 mil in thickness
• Prohibiting the addition of hazardous ingredients such as carcinogens, heavy metals, phthalates, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and fragrances that can further pollute the recycled plastic supply chain or pose harm to users
• Requiring source reduced, recyclable, or post-consumer content in packaging materials

The draft standard and a supplemental background report are available here.

A Collaborative Approach to Standard Development 

Green Seal’s standard development process includes input from a Working Group made up of leading companies, nonprofit organizations, and independent subject matter experts. Working Group members provide technical and market feedback throughout the standard development process, program implementation, and evolution to ensure the standard is a meaningful tool for manufacturers and consumers.

Seeking Feedback 

Green Seal welcomes public input on the draft standard. The public comment period is open until January 29, 2023. Review the draft standard or submit comments here. 

Green Seal’s reputation for credibility and market impact rests on an open and transparent process for developing and revising our science-based standards. All standard development and major standard revisions include extensive stakeholder outreach and opportunities for public input. Green Seal will publish all formally submitted comments, as well as a response to each substantive issue identified by commenters.

Amazon’s data shows products see a 12.5% sales lift within the first year of joining the Climate Pledge Friendly program. An independent report by Harvard Business Review confirmed this data, finding that sustainability certifications boosted customer demand by 13%, regardless of the type of product. 

Green Seal was an original participant in Climate Pledge Friendly when Amazon launched the initiative in the U.S. in 2020 to make it easier for customers to discover and shop for more sustainable products. Products certified to Green Seal’s standards automatically qualify for the Climate Pledge Friendly badge, indicating to shoppers that the products meet meaningful sustainability standards.

Green Seal’s science-based certification standards emphasize health and safety, prohibiting a comprehensive list of harmful chemicals in certified products and requiring a rigorous examination of a product’s environmental leadership in areas including raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, and how the product is used and disposed of. Critically, Green Seal’s testing requirements mean that certified products are verified to deliver uncompromising performance. 

This is the latest in a series of partnerships Green Seal has announced to promote certified products, cleaning services and hotels, including with Wayfair, Google Travel, the International WELL Building Institute, the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Health Product Declaration Collaborative.

Learn more about Green Seal’s partnerships in our Impact Report, and learn more about Wayfair’s Shop Sustainably initiative here.

Green Seal’s standards have long prohibited long-chain PFAS formally classified as hazardous. However, a growing body of evidence indicates that short-chain PFAS known as “safer substitutes” have the same harmful health and environmental effects as the legacy PFAS they are replacing. Green Seal’s newly expanded prohibition on all PFAS in certified cleaning and personal care products promotes safer options for consumers and recognizes industry leaders who are taking important steps to protect human health and reduce environmental pollution.  

Green Seal is taking a product-category approach to developing PFAS restrictions as part of a multi-year phased initiative to ensure that certified products in all categories have leadership restrictions on PFAS. A product-category approach is critical to ensure our policy effectively addresses manufacturing and use considerations that vary by product category, including exposure pathways, functional performance, and regrettable substitutes. 

What are PFAS? 

PFAS are a large group of synthetically produced chemicals that have a history of use dating back to the 1940s. This class includes over 12,000 chemicals identified by the U.S. EPA CompTox PFAS Master List database — an evolving list that aggregates PFAS based on environmental occurrence, manufacturing process data, and testing programs from agencies across the globe. Today, PFAS are found in food packaging, coatings, personal care and cosmetics, paints, textiles, cookware, and even some cleaning products. 

PFAS have carbon-fluorine bonds that make them very stable and effective at repelling oil, water, and heat. Unfortunately, the same unique chemical structure that makes PFAS so effective is also what gives them the moniker “forever chemicals.”  

PFAS are persistent in the environment, with evidence that some chemicals are so resistant to degradation that they could persist for hundreds of years. They are now found in drinking water and bioaccumulate in both soil and humans, with some chemicals taking more than eight years to reach their half-life — or reduce their concentration by 50 percent in the human body. 

PFAS are associated with numerous adverse health effects, including impacts on the endocrine and reproductive systems; increased risks of prostate, testicular, and kidney cancer; and decreased immune responses — including our body’s ability to develop beneficial antibodies in response to vaccines. 

Providing Transparency  

It can be challenging for consumers and even manufacturers to be sure that products do not use PFAS. For example, PFAS are often used in raw materials – and those proprietary formulas are often not fully disclosed to the final manufacturer. Eliminating all PFAS from the supply chain for consumer and professional care products is a critical step in protecting human health and ending the environmental contamination caused by releases of these chemicals.  

To increase supply chain transparency and encourage the use of safer alternatives, Green Seal added criteria to prohibit PFAS in standards for the following product categories: 

• General Purpose Cleaners (GS-8, GS-37) 
• Laundry Care Products (GS-48, GS-51) 
• Specialty Cleaners (GS-52, GS-53) 
• Personal and Hand Care Products (GS-41, GS-44, GS-50) 

Green Seal focused first on eliminating PFAS in formulas for certified cleaning and personal care products because PFAS is non-essential for the performance for these types of products. Manufacturers have one year to document that their certified products comply with the updated PFAS criteria. Green Seal will now turn its focus to establishing PFAS requirements for other product category standards.   

Green Seal implements standard development based on best international practices using a stakeholder-based approach and opportunities for public comment. We appreciate the time and expertise provided by our stakeholders in this process, including the San Francisco Department of the Environment, Ecolab, the Household and Commercial Products Association, and other subject matter experts and manufacturers.  

 
Visit Green Seal’s Standard Projects page to access the final PFAS requirements and standard development documentation.

Green Seal’s work follows a compass that focuses on four key targets: protecting human health, minimizing waste, ensuring clean water, and preserving the climate. This compass keeps us focused on Green Seal’s priority impacts, ensuring that Green Seal certification reflects products and services that are safer for people and our planet. In this blog post, I will describe how Green Seal verifies that certified products protect the health of water resources.

What You Should Know About Water Pollution

Water pollution is a global issue and a continuing challenge in the U.S. Almost half of our rivers and streams are unsuitable for fishing or swimming because of high concentrations of pollutants.

Water pollution sources are diverse, ranging from agricultural and stormwater runoff to industrial spills, discarded tires, wastewater discharges, and the chemical soup of landfill leachate. Toxic chemicals in conventional household and commercial products can contaminate water bodies when these products are manufactured, used, and improperly disposed of.

Green Seal encourages and incentivizes companies to avoid water pollution by designing greener, healthier products that phase out hazardous chemicals from products and supply chains, instead of shifting the burden of chemical pollution to wastewater treatment plants.

Our High Standard for Ensuring Clean Water

The Green Seal Certification Mark helps buyers find products that are verified to be safer for aquatic ecosystems and to preserve our water quality. Below is an overview of some of the water protective requirements in Green Seal standards.

Products Cannot Be Harmful to Aquatic Life

Green Seal evaluates each ingredient in certified products to verify that the product is not harmful to aquatic life, meaning that short-term exposure to the ingredient will not harm fish or other organisms.

Green Seal does this by verifying an ingredient’s median lethal concentration of fish or its median effective concentration for immobilization of daphnia (water fleas). This means that a study has been conducted to identify how much of the ingredient will kill or immobilize half of the exposed test organisms over the course of a few days. If a small amount of an ingredient can kill half of the test organisms, that ingredient is classified as toxic to aquatic life. In general, when a study shows that an ingredient’s median concentration is greater than 100 milligrams per liter of test water, it is considered not harmful to aquatic life.

Products Must Be Biodegradable

Cleaning and facility care products can be formulated with chemicals that are persistent in the environment. Persistent chemicals take more than 40 days in typical aquatic conditions to break down into carbon dioxide, water, and harmless minerals. Because persistent chemicals remain in the environment longer, they have more time and opportunity to do harm than chemicals that are highly toxic but degrade rapidly. For example, certain surfactants in conventional cleaning products break down into nonylphenols which are toxic to aquatic life, are endocrine disruptors, and can take five years to degrade. Another example, per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS), can take decades or longer to degrade and are linked to prostate, breast, liver, and ovarian cancers and endocrine disruption.

Green Seal screens cleaning products to verify that ingredients are biodegradable in aquatic settings based on internationally accepted definitions and test methods.

Chemicals Must Not Bioaccumulate

Certain chemicals are known to accumulate in the body tissue of animals and people. Even though a chemical may exist at very low levels in food or water, when it enters our bodies faster than it leaves, it can build up and cause numerous adverse health effects. Certain bioaccumulative chemicals are associated with cancer and neurological damage. Mercury is a well-known heavy metal that bioaccumulates in fish, which is why the US Food and Drug Administration sets guidelines of 2-3 weekly servings of fish for young children and pregnant women. Certain PFAS, the persistent chemicals mentioned above, also bioaccumulate in human tissue, fish, and other wildlife.

Green Seal prohibits the use of chemicals that bioaccumulate in certified cleaning products.

Products Cannot Contain Optical Brighteners

Optical brighteners are a type of chemical used in laundry cleaning products to make fabrics seem whiter and brighter. Optical brighteners are prohibited because they are not readily biodegradable and may bioaccumulate — therefore failing two of Green Seal’s hazard endpoints.

Products Must Limit Phosphorous Use to Prevent Eutrophication

Eutrophication is when rivers, lakes, and coastal waters become saturated with nitrogen or phosphorus, causing the rapid growth of aquatic plants and algae, some of which are toxic. These plants are consumed by microbes that deplete the oxygen in the water, creating expansive “dead zones” where fish and aquatic life cannot survive. Eutrophication reduces biodiversity, affects water clarity, and often produces a terrible stench. When eutrophication occurs in marine waters, the plants and algae decompose and release carbon dioxide into the water – making ocean water more acidic and harming many species of marine life, including fish and shellfish.

Green Seal sets limits on phosphorus use to prevent certified cleaning products from contributing to eutrophication.

Companies Must Conserve Water

Certain Green Seal standards set limits on water usage, which is another important way to protect our water resources.

Hotels and lodging properties certified to Green Seal’s gold standard have saved up to 10 million gallons of water a year by meeting Green Seal’s criteria for using water-saving toilets and fixtures.

Manufacturers of Green Seal-certified sanitary paper products must meet limits on gallons of water used to produce a ton of final product.

Impacts that Matter

Producing greener products, fostering greener supply chains, and implementing water conservation policies are critical steps that today’s leaders are taking on the path to a low impact economy. Green Seal recognizes these leaders with third-party certification so that you can identify choices that protect public health, safeguard our rivers and lakes, and preserve our climate.

Green Seal is proposing a new prohibition on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, a large class of chemicals that are commonly used in consumer products and associated with a number of adverse health and environmental effects.

Although only seven PFAS are formally classified as hazardous, a growing body of evidence indicates that all PFAS are likely to have harmful health and environmental effects. While Green Seal has long prohibited those seven PFAS, as part of Green Seal’s precautionary approach, we are now proposing to prohibit all chemicals in this class (approximately 12,000 PFAS) in certified products.

It can be challenging for consumers and even manufacturers to be sure that products do not use PFAS. For example, PFAS are often used in raw materials – and those proprietary formulas are often not fully disclosed to the final manufacturer. A prohibition on PFAS would allow Green Seal to verify that these chemicals are eliminated from these product supply chains and provide assurance to both manufacturers and buyers that their Green Seal certified cleaning and personal care products are PFAS-free.

Green Seal is taking a multi-year phased approach to this initiative, with the end goal of ensuring all certified product formulas and product packaging are PFAS-free across product categories. In this initial phase, our focus is on eliminating PFAS in formulas for certified cleaning and personal care products.

What are PFAS?

PFAS are a large group of synthetically produced chemicals that have a history of use dating back to the 1940s. PFAS have carbon-fluorine bonds that make them very stable and effective at repelling oil, water and heat. Today they are found in food packaging, coatings, paints, textiles, cookware, and even some cleaning products.

Unfortunately, the same unique chemical structure that makes PFAS so effective is also what gives them the moniker “forever chemicals.” PFAS are persistent in the environment, with evidence that some chemicals are so resistant to degradation that they could persist for hundreds of years. They also bioaccumulate in soil, drinking water and in humans, with some chemicals taking more than eight years to reach their half-life — or reduce their concentration by 50 percent in the human body.

PFAS are associated with numerous adverse health effects, including impacts on the endocrine and reproductive systems; increased risks of certain cancers such as prostate, testicular, and kidney; and decreased immune responses — including our body’s ability to develop beneficial antibodies in response to vaccines.

Eliminating PFAS

While two of the approximately 12,000 PFAS have been phased out of use in the U.S., evidence shows that the “safer substitutes” (other PFAS) also cause harmful health effects. Therefore, Green Seal is proposing to prohibit all chemicals classified as PFAS by the US EPA’s comprehensive CompTox PFAS Master List database — an evolving list that aggregates PFAS based on environmental occurrence, manufacturing process data, and testing programs from agencies across the globe.

Eliminating all PFAS from the supply chain for consumer and professional care products is a critical step in protecting human health and ending the environmental contamination caused by releases of these chemicals.

Proposed Changes

Recognizing an opportunity to increase supply chain transparency and encourage the use of safer alternatives, Green Seal is proposing to add criteria prohibiting PFAS to our standards for cleaning products and personal care products. These proposed updates include:

• Prohibiting any intentionally added PFAS
• Restricting any PFAS to 100ppm when present as a contaminant

The PFAS criteria will be added to the product health and environmental requirements section of each of the following standards:

• General Purpose Cleaners (GS-8, GS-37)
• Laundry Care Products (GS-48, GS-51)
• Specialty Cleaners (GS-52, GS-53)
• Personal Care Products (GS-44, GS-50)

Seeking Feedback

The public comment period is now open until January 22, 2022. To submit comments or schedule a conference call, contact us by email here.

The Proposed Revisions and supplementary documents are available on Green Seal’s Standard Projects page.

Green Seal’s reputation for credibility and market impact rests on an open and transparent process for developing and revising our science-based standards. All major standard revisions include extensive stakeholder outreach and opportunities for public input. Green Seal publishes all formally submitted comments, as well as a response to each substantive issue identified by commenters.

The Benefits of Microbial Products

Formulating with microbes is an exciting application of green chemistry. These naturally existing ingredients can allow product formulas to reduce or eliminate hazardous solvents and surfactants and make it easier for producers to formulate with biobased rather than petroleum-based ingredients.

In certain cases, these products are likely to be healthier, to degrade at a faster rate and under more natural conditions, and to be less harmful for aquatic life. Microbial-based cleaning products are sometimes referred to as “probiotic cleaners” because their active ingredients are non-pathogenic, commercially cultured bacterial strains, similar to what is in your yogurt, kimchi, and sauerkraut.

Assessing Health and Safety

When Green Seal first issued criteria for microbial-based cleaning products in 2011, we took a precautionary approach by designing heavy restrictions until more information was known about the safety and environmental impacts of this newer product type. In the decade since then, these products have proliferated across the North American and global markets.

Now, extensive literature reviews and stakeholder outreach have demonstrated a sufficient record of safe use, with no scientific evidence that microbial-based cleaning products present a higher level of risk to human health or the environment than chemical-based cleaning products. Adding to our understanding of their safety profile, these types of products are being studied as safer options in healthcare settings.

Expanding Options for Safer Cleaning Products

Recognizing the green chemistry benefits and safety profiles of microbial-based cleaning products, Green Seal has adjusted our requirements for these products.

A key update is that we are now allowing certified microbial-based cleaning products to be sold in spray packaging.  Because Green Seal takes a precautionary approach to newer chemistries and technologies, we have incorporated health-protective requirements that are intended to address the risk of inhaling microorganisms during product application.  Microbial-based products in spray packaging must either:

• Be formulated only with non-pathogenic microorganisms that are listed on the European Food Safety Authority’s (EFSA’s) Qualified Presumption of Safety list, or
• Undergo inhalation exposure testing via a test chamber and demonstrate a low level of airborne microorganisms after product application.

We have also updated our labeling requirements to be more practical and allow for more flexibility in how companies disclose microbial ingredients on the product label.

Visit our Standard Projects page to see the final requirements, red-lined tracked changes, and all development documentation.

About This Initiative

Green Seal implements standard development based on best international practices using a stakeholder-based approach. We appreciate the time and expertise provided by our stakeholders in this process, including the American Cleaning Institute (ACI), EcoQuality Solutions, Genesis Biosciences, the Household and Commercial Products Association, and other subject matter experts and manufacturers.

As always, Green Seal will study the value and benefits of these criteria to product formulators and product users. We are excited to explore opportunities to further raise the bar for these products by lowering thresholds, providing greater transparency around microbial strains in products, and enforcing stronger quality control.

Green Seal’s work follows a compass that focuses on four key targets: protecting human health, minimizing waste, ensuring clean water, and preserving the climate. This compass keeps us focused on Green Seal’s priority impacts, ensuring that Green Seal certification reflects products and services that are safer for people and our planet. In this blog post, I will describe how Green Seal verifies that certified products have achieved significant waste minimization across the product lifecycle.

Addressing Product Waste Across the Lifecycle

Online shopping in the U.S. rose by an astonishing 32% in 2020 over the previous year, representing $790 billion in consumer spending. While many of us are conscientiously flattening the cardboard boxes, crumpling the hard plastics, and collecting the plastic film wrappings, we are seeking more sustainable options. Research shows more than half of US consumers are concerned with the environmental impact of packaging waste. To shift industry toward meaningful and significant waste prevention and minimization, and allow product users to dispose responsibly, Green Seal verifies waste minimization across the product lifecycle – from raw materials selection, product design, and production to transportation and end-of-life.

Raw Materials

Recovered materials: preventing de-forestation and lowering emissions

Designing single-use tissue products with high levels of recycled content not only prevents deforestation but also reduces the carbon emissions generated during production.

Green Seal-certified bath tissue, facial tissue, and foodservice napkins are required to be composed of 100 percent recycled material – that means that there is no virgin fiber in those products. Why? These products are single use. Unlike writing paper, which can be recycled, it is important to design products based on how many times they can be re-used.

Choosing certified products adds up to big impacts. Green Seal-certified recycled-content sanitary paper saves 3.2 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year, the equivalent of taking 695,936 cars off the road for a year.

Product Design, Production, and Transportation

Concentration requirements: curbing plastic use and lowering emissions

Professional products and, more recently, a variety of household cleaning products – including laundry detergent pods and sheets – are shifting to concentrated products. This significantly reduces carbon emissions by avoiding shipping water weight from the manufacturing plant to the distribution center and then to a store, office, or home. For example, a conventional glass cleaner sold in the US can be filled with more than 90% water – meaning you can seek out low-carbon products simply by choosing products that come as concentrated pods and solid bars or sheets – instead of ready-to-use liquids.

To achieve certification, Green Seal requires professional products to be concentrated at the following levels:

• For general-purpose cleaners: at least 1:32 — 1 part product to 32 parts water
• For glass, restroom, and carpet cleaner: at least 1:16

Another significant benefit to concentrated products is the associated reduction in plastic use from replacing disposable plastic spray bottles with reusable systems. Case in point: Green Seal-certified concentrated cleaning products saved 197 million pounds of plastic in 2020 alone – the equivalent of 1.2 billion industry standard plastic bottles. 

Greener packaging materials – Preserving resources and curbing plastic use 

Green Seal requires packaging to be either source-reduced, recyclable, contain at least 25% percent post-consumer material, or be a refillable package with an effective take-back program. Additionally, we don’t allow secondary packaging unless the product is a concentrate – like a pod, for example. This means that the product can’t be packaged in a rigid plastic and then again in a cardboard box. We also verify that packaging is not produced with hazardous toxins such as phthalates, BPA, and heavy metals. Materials that contain fewer hazardous chemicals can be re-processed and recycled more easily. 

Product Use

Product functional performance: preventing wasted resources

Many of us have surely purchased a product, tried it out, and sadly tossed it in the trash after one or two disappointing experiences. It didn’t remove a stain, the odor from your sneakers was not hidden under the stench of the fragrance, or the paint required five applications before it looked consistent on your wall. Green Seal sets performance requirements to make sure that the products we certify work effectively, meaning they work according to a standardized test or work as well as a market-leading or nationally available product on the North American market.

Ensuring that certified products perform as well as or better than conventional alternatives avoids waste from discarded products that fail to meet consumer expectations.

Product durability

For certain product types – such as paints — durability is a critical concern; a long-lasting product greatly reduces the environmental impact. For example, if you buy a paint product that lasts 2-3 years, you will end up using twice as many resources as if you had used a paint that lasts 5-7 years.

Impacts that Matter 

Preventing and minimizing waste is a critical goal for shifting to a low impact economy – one in which we are healthier, our rivers and lakes are cleaner, and our climate is preserved.

With improved product design, less shipping of water, greater use of recovered materials, and well-performing, long-lasting products, we can reduce the waste that is so costly to our society and ecosystems. Leading product manufacturers are doing the work: they’re shifting their supply chains and investing in greener technologies – and achieving recognition through Green Seal product certification. With the complexity of the market, the Green Seal Certification Mark provides clarity, signifying that a product meets a strong benchmark of health and environmental leadership — thereby making it simple for buyers to make the greener choice.  

Now, Green Seal’s paint certification is the only mark in the marketplace to qualify products for both LEED v4.1 low-emitting materials credit requirements and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly badge — making it simple for health-focused buyers to identify safer products.

Working with Paint Industry Leaders

The North American paints and coatings industry has made major strides in green chemistry innovation in tandem with growing market demand for healthier, greener products. Leading manufacturers have achieved significant reductions in VOC content and hazardous chemical ingredients while maintaining the performance consumers expect.

Green Seal’s original leadership standard for paints and coatings, published in 1993, was the first to set limits on VOCs. Today, Green Seal’s is still the only standard in this product category to restrict carcinogens, reproductive toxins, hazardous air pollutants, alkylphenol ethoxylates, and a host of other chemicals, ensuring certified products are safer for building occupants while providing uncompromising functional performance.

Manufacturer investments and innovations have led to safer supply chains and improved air quality around the world. Case in point: In 2020, paints and coatings meeting Green Seal’s leadership standard prevented more than half a million pounds of VOC pollution across 120 million square feet of LEED-certified building space alone.

Aligning with LEED to Provide Buyers a Simple Choice

Green Seal regularly evaluates our standards for accuracy and relevance to ensure they correctly define sustainability leadership in an evolving marketplace. The updated standard protects indoor air quality; ensures certified products are safer for people and the planet; and aligns with the most recent version of the LEED green building standard (LEED v4.1), a key market driver.

The standard’s three key updates are:

• Strengthening VOC Content Limits. All products must comply with the VOC limits defined by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). CARB VOC limits reduce the potential for the formation of photochemical ozone and smog, which can cause serious respiratory issues.
• Requiring VOC emissions testing. Products must undergo VOC emissions testing conducted in an environmental chamber according to the State of California’s Department of Public Health Standard Method (CDPH). This test allows Green Seal to confirm low levels of off-gassing after paints are applied, increasing health protections for building occupants and promoting overall healthier indoor environments.
• Aligning two chemical restrictions with LEED language. A clarification that perchloroethylene and methylene chloride — which Green Seal prohibited in certified products decades ahead of government regulation — are not allowed to be intentionally added to product formulas at any level.

Products certified to Green Seal’s revised standard meet both the chemical content and VOC emissions testing requirements of LEED v4.1, making it easy for green building project managers to identify products that check all the boxes.

Did You Know…

Green Seal follows a compass that focuses on four key targets: human health, waste, water, and climate. We develop our sustainability criteria using a lifecycle analysis method, which identifies the health and environmental impacts of a product all the way from raw material extraction to manufacturing, packaging, use, and disposal. Green Seal’s compass keeps us focused on the impacts that matter most, ensuring that Green Seal certification represents products and services that truly are safer for people and the planet.

Protecting Human Health

There are more than 80,000 chemicals registered for use in the U.S., and the great majority haven’t been assessed for their effects on human health.

Green Seal strictly limits chemicals that don’t belong in household or professional products, making it simple for people to make healthier, safer choices with confidence. In fact, Green Seal has often acted decades ahead of regulators and retailers – including, for example, prohibiting the neurotoxin methylene chloride and the carcinogen 1,4-dioxane as far back as 1993.

Carcinogens, mutagens, reproductive toxins, and common toxic ingredients such as phthalates, methanol, and bisphenol A (BPA) are strictly prohibited in Green Seal–certified products.

Minimizing Waste

The waste quadrant of Green Seal’s compass addresses the amount of recovered materials in a product as well as its performance, durability and recyclability. Green Seal-certified products use environmentally preferable packaging materials, include recycling instructions, and provide detailed directions for proper use to minimize product waste.

A foundational belief at Green Seal is that a product is not green if it doesn’t work as consumers expect it to. Green Seal’s functional performance criteria ensure that certified products perform as well as or better than conventional alternatives, avoiding waste from discarded products that fail to meet consumer expectations.

Ensuring Clean Water

This compass area assesses a product’s impacts on water bodies. Green Seal’s standards require aquatic biodegradability and prohibit chemicals that can harm or kill aquatic wildlife. In addition, Green Seal sets strict limits on bioaccumulating compounds to prevent the build-up of contaminants in fish and other organisms, which, in turn, helps protect humans from ingesting unsafe levels of chemicals from lower in the food chain.

Preserving the Climate

This quadrant aims to address a product’s global warming potential, smog formation, stratospheric ozone depletion, and energy use. Since preserving the climate is a multifaceted goal, many of Green Seal’s standard criteria for protecting human health, minimizing waste, and ensuring clean water also address this impact area. Limiting volatile organic compounds (VOCs), prohibiting ozone depleting compounds, and replacing virgin materials with recycled materials all preserve the climate and are relevant to categories as diverse as sanitary paper products and paints and coatings.

While VOCs are commonly linked with human health impacts, they are equally relevant to climate impacts because they interact with nitrous oxides in the atmosphere to form ozone — a greenhouse gas that can cause temperature increases when found in lower layers of the atmosphere. Limiting this class of chemicals is one way that Green Seal ensures certified products have lower environmental footprints than conventional alternatives. Pair this with requirements to reduce fossil fuel consumption and energy use, and it is clear how certified products can make a measurable difference in protecting the climate.

This is the first in a series of stories about Green Seal’s Compass.

With our new certification program, Green Seal is providing consumers, purchasers and facility managers a simple way to identify hand sanitizers that meet the highest standard for health, safety and performance.

The Highest Standard of Clean

Formulating with healthier ingredients is vital for a product that people apply to their skin dozens of times a day. Our new certification standard, created with input from public health and industry experts, screens 100% of alcohol-based hand sanitizer product formulas for:

• carcinogens
• reproductive toxins
• skin irritants
• phthalates
• parabens, and
• contaminants

And as always, consumers can be confident that Green Seal-certified products meet uncompromising performance standards, do not pollute waterways, and use environmentally preferable packaging materials.

Verification By a Trusted Authority 

Our new hand sanitizer certification program is part of our commitment to leverage our expertise in healthy and sustainable cleaning and facility care to help protect people from both COVID-19 and negative health impacts from toxic chemicals. 

• Green Seal’s Guidelines for Safer Cleaning and Disinfection for schools and workplaces have been adopted by commercial cleaning companies servicing more than 1 billion square feet of space.
• We’ve partnered with SEIU 32BJ, the largest union of property service workers in the U.S., on COVID-19 training for its members.
• More than 30,000 Green Seal certified products are used in offices, schools and homes each day, including cleaning products and hand soaps critical to de-contaminating buildings and protecting people.

Learn more about Green Seal certification for hand sanitizers here. 

Titanium dioxide is a colorant that is included to whiten and brighten many types of products – from food to paints and personal care products. In enzyme-based cleaning products, like with paints and makeup, consumers show preference for whiter and brighter options and this is why manufacturers see titanium dioxide as a key ingredient.

Titanium dioxide was previously prohibited in all cleaning products because it is classified as a “Group 2B” carcinogen, i.e., “Possibly Carcinogenic” when inhaled¹ (and only when inhaled).  Because we’ve seen this ingredient in a wide range of enzyme-based cleaning products, we conducted several health impact analyses and identified a meaningful solution. We developed a set of requirements that ensures that titanium dioxide particles will not become airborne when the product is used. Below we’ve walked through this framework of requirements and summarized our key considerations, but you can find the full technical proposal on our website.

 Our Open and Transparent Process

As always, we published this proposal for public comment and actively solicited feedback during a six-month period in order to ensure that we heard perspectives from all interested groups. This open process and our evidence-based decision-making is at the core of Green Seal standard development.

Green Seal Focuses on What Matters

We take our role seriously as an environmental organization that sets the bar for sustainability and defines meaningful health protections for products and services. We work to advance industries toward healthier, safer, and greener practices, and also to ensure a wide range of certified products so that conscious consumers can have their pick.

In this case, the results of our health impact analyses demonstrated that we could confidently allow manufactures to provide certified products that are formulated with titanium dioxide. With this move, we ensure that these certified products can be just as white and bright as their conventional counterparts while being significantly healthier and greener. It’s a minor change for our standards; this is one of more than 65,000 chemicals that we scrutinize during our certification processes – however, it’s a meaningful change for our product manufacturing community and a reminder that we focus on real-world health and environmental impacts instead of simply checking the boxes.  

 Protecting the Health of the User

In our proposal, we demonstrated that titanium dioxide can be present in an enzyme-based cleaning product without any risk of the product user inhaling this compound.

• For foam, gel, and liquid products – the product itself does not become airborne. Therefore, we set no conditions on allowing titanium dioxide as an ingredient.
• For solid products, dust can be generated by the product that could be inhaled during the use phase. Therefore, in order to include titanium dioxide as an ingredient, the manufacturer must provide evidence that the titanium dioxide particles are bound within the product matrix or to bonded to other product ingredients. This protective requirement aligns with the protections stated by the State of California’s Proposition 65 program, which only considers titanium dioxide carcinogenic when it is airborne and unbound.
• For liquid products, there is an existing Green Seal requirement that states that enzyme-based cleaning products cannot be sold in spray packaging; therefore, we’ve already set requirements that prevent liquid from becoming airborne via dispersed spray and inhaled by the product user.

Within this framework, Green Seal has maintained a strict level of health protections for product users. As always, when Green Seal appears on a product label, consumers can be confident that these products will work effectively, will protect their family, workers, and our environment – and now, thanks to this revision, these products might be a bit whiter.