Every ingredient in every SC Johnson product goes through our rigorous Greenlist™ program. Its centerpiece is a science-based, four-step evaluation that looks at both hazard and risk. It’s grounded in best-in-class data collection and driven by our commitment to continually improve our products.
We take great care to choose ingredients that pass each of the steps in our four-step evaluation. There are a small number of cases where the best available ingredient, like the active ingredient in an insecticide, might fail one of these steps. If so, it goes through a product risk assessment to determine the level that is safe for humans and the environment. Then we apply an added degree of caution.
Our evaluation looks at these criteria:
Step 1: Chronic human health hazards, such as the potential to cause cancer or reproductive diseases. Our data sources for this include California Proposition 65 and the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer monographs. We take an abundance of precaution with this step, and the vast majority of ingredients we use pass it. Of the very few that fail, which tend to be ingredients in products like insecticides, we set a safety factor that is over a thousand times lower than the lowest level that could possibly impact human health or the environment.
Step 2: Long-term environmental hazards, meaning the potential to persist, accumulate and be toxic in the environment, what’s known as being a “PBT.” Our data sources for this include the European Chemical Agency (ECHA), ECHA’s Substances of Very High Concern list and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s PBT Profiler and criteria for PBT assessment. Like Step 1, any indication of being a PBT will cause an ingredient to fail the evaluation, triggering an assessment of safe use as explained below.
Step 3: Acute risks to human and environmental health, such as mammalian or aquatic toxicity. Instead of the long-term effects examined in Steps 1 and 2, this step looks at potential short-term effects like skin irritation or the release of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) into the air. Our data sources for this include supplier Safety Data Sheets, the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s TOXNET, and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development guidelines. The intended use for some of our products influences this evaluation. For example, we want our insecticides to be toxic to bugs but safe for humans. So, for certain ingredients, when used in certain products, we allow for different levels of impact.
Step 4: Other potential effects, for example whether an ingredient could cause an allergic reaction on the skin. The Greenlist™ program is designed for continuous improvement – both in our products and the program itself. This final step considers areas where data and methodologies are still being developed and we might want to consider new criteria to add in the future. Right now, our focus is skin allergens. We wanted to go beyond convention and offer greater transparency, so we developed a science-based, externally valid process for
skin allergen identification and transparency. While these ingredients are used only in amounts that are unlikely to cause issues, we felt this new Greenlist™ criteria added even more helpful information for consumers.