Wallet Mouth

Cancer warning to appear on "natural" labels?

Think your "green" soap is squeaky-clean? Maybe not. The California Attorney General's Office has filed a complaint against four makers of green-branded personal-care and cleaning products, stating that they are violating the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986 (Proposition 65)—and the state's unfair-competition law, to boot.

Products made by Avalon Organics (owner of the Alba brand), Beaumont (Citrus Magic), NutriBiotic, and Whole Foods (specifically, its private-label brand, 365) were recently found to contain the toxic contaminant 1,4 dioxane (which I've blogged about before). The AG's suit states that the companies have known that their products were exposing users to 1,4-dioxane since late May of 2004, yet they did not provide "a clear and reasonable warning," as required by law. Violations of the safety law and the unfair-competition law each carry penalties of $2,500 a day.

1,4-dioxane is not an ingredient per se but rather a by-product of a process called ethoxylation.

Citrus Magic 100% Natural Dish Liquid is the product with by far the highest level of the contaminant (97.1 parts per million), according to the Organic Consumers Association's study (whose results, according to my sources, were confirmed by tests the AG's office had done). NutriBiotic's Super Shower Gel Shampoo with GSE was found to contain 32.2ppm, Alba's Passion Fruit Body Wash contains 18.2ppm, and Whole Foods' 365 Everyday Value Shower Gel contains 20.1ppm.

Some contend that a little bit of dioxane probably isn't anything to worry about (specifically, TreeHugger writer Karin Kloosterman in this post, and Ecover, whose dishwashing liquid was found to have 2.4ppm). For context, I looked at the EPA's webpage on the chemical. There, I learned that 500ppm is the ceiling recommended by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health to avoid "immediate damage to life or health," and that according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, 100ppm is the concentration to which most workers can be exposed without adverse effects "over a normal 8-h workday or a 40-h workweek" (which? I wondered).

One can't help but observe that 100ppm is pretty close to the 97.1ppm in Citrus Magic... but fortunately, even with my exacting standards, I don't (quite) spend eight hours a day scrubbing our dishes.

Since when did “organic” mean “contains toxic chemical”?

Last Friday was a bad day for the natural-products industry. At the sector’s ExpoWest trade show, it was announced that a new study found a number of supposedly “natural” and “organic” body-care and cleaning products contain a nasty chemical called 1,4-dioxane (which the EPA classifies as a “probable human carcinogen”) that you won’t see on the ingredients list. (You can read the L.A. Times’ coverage of it here.)

Giovanni Organic Cosmetics, Jason (whose slogan is “Pure, Natural & Organic”), Kiss My Face, Nature’s Gate, and Seventh Generation were among the leading brands called out in the study, which was commissioned by the Organic Consumers Association.

To Seventh Generation’s credit, it has said that it intends to “completely eliminate 1,4-dioxane from all of our products.”

A couple months ago I blogged about learning that a lotion I’ve used for years contains toxins. But that was a conventional product. Wouldn’t you think that skin softeners with the words “natural” and “organic” would tend to be clean? Look at the study’s product list (pdf) and see for yourself.

Some people will probably say, Sure, this chemical isn’t ideal, but we’re talking parts per million here—how bad can that be? But as Adam Eidinger of the Organic Consumer Association pointed out to me, the EPA’s standard for safe drinking water is 3 parts per billion. “Granted, you’re not drinking these things, but you are putting them down the drain and introducing it into the environment,” he said. Not to mention absorbing their ingredients through your skin (pdf).

Here are some tips from the OCA on how to avoid 1,4-dioxane.

Amuse-bouche: Cleaning products cleaning up their act

The big boys are getting into the green act.