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by Heidi Siegelbaum
Calyx Sustainable Tourism
heidi@calyxsite.com
(206) 784-4265

January 16, 2010

To read a label and understand not only its ingredients but what it means to your health and the local environment and your kids and your bottom line... is the ultimate power. Outside financial investments, the power of your pocketbook and your analytical mind are the most powerful tools in your arsenal because they protect you, represent an affirmative act about your values, and send a message to manufacturers about what you will and will not tolerate.

Late in 2009, the Consumer Specialty Products Association (CSPA) and the Soap and Detergent Association (SDA) announced its members would voluntarily disclose select ingredients in four classes of products, including air fresheners and cleaning products. While facially laudable, the Consumer Product Ingredient Communication Initiative still contains some loopholes akin to a fishnet stocking:
* It's voluntary
* It only covers intentionally added ingredients, therefore excluding by-products such as 1,4 dioxane, a probable human carcinogen
* Preservatives,  dyes and fragrances -- the trifecta of bad boys -- do not have to be specifically identified
* Nomenclature (naming) for chemical identities will be inconsistent

The initiative's public relations documents claim one of the initiative's goals is to provide meaningful information on ingredients. However, any of you who have ever read the polysyllabic goop on a product label will be hard pressed to derive real meaning from an ingredient list, particularly one which excises some of the worst actors found in fragrances and preservatives. In a related action, the International Fragrance Association recently disclosed its long list of all constituents used in fragrance. That's promising but consumers will still not know what particular cocktail of toxics is contained in household products under the term "parfum," or "fragrance." You can assume the worst.

All mental frames around toxics and consumer products are tightly controlled in Frank Luntz-esque directives on truthiness. In keeping with this trend, the CSPA formed a nonprofit, the Alliance for Consumer Education (ACE), an increasingly popular form of consumer-oriented sites from corporations that design consumer reality by defining risk, issues, and product safety in the vacuum of sturdy and consistent government outreach to consumers. ACE's Board of Trustees, sponsors, and partners is a veritable Who's Who in manufacturing, including the American Petroleum Institute.

ACE's site warns against home-mixed cleaning products such as those using baking soda and vinegar because they don't kill germs. Our love affair with disinfectants and cleaning all forms of microbials, including beneficial bacteria, is creating a super class of resistant bugs that render antibiotics useless when we really need them.

The ACE is, in part, a backlash against the popular green cleaning revolt championed by Women's Voices for the Earth. Millions of highly vexed consumers held WVE's green cleaning parties for years, which not only boosted baking soda sales, but avoided the piranha-in-a-box-of-Cracker Jacks® inherent in buying products you really know nothing about.

The natural personal care products industry is taking full advantage of increasing consumer dissatisfaction at industry stonewalling in ingredient disclosure and their failure to find less harmful substitutes. The next Sustainable Cosmetics Summit will be held in New York in March and is supported by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the Natural Products Association. The interest in natural home and personal care products is also accompanied by a trend in the cosmeceuticals market... beauty-from-within goes mainstream... but we'll see, or will we feel the immersion?