The first products to earn the new Green Good Housekeeping Seal were announced yesterday. The Green Good Housekeeping Seal (GGHS), is meant to be an environmental extension of the Good Housekeeping well-known primary Seal, and products with the seal are supposed to help consumers who want to live greener. How does the seal stack up? Let’s find out.

Why introduce a green seal?:

“The Good Housekeeping Seal was originally created to protect consumers from potentially dangerous products and false claims,” said Rosemary Ellis, editor-in-chief of Good Housekeeping. “Today our readers are interested in making choices that are healthier for their families and for the planet, so we’re continuing our legacy of consumer advocacy with the Green Good Housekeeping Seal, offering consumers a guide, backed by scientific research, for products making significant steps towards being environmentally sound.”

“There is an overwhelming number of products making green claims in today’s market,” said Miriam Arond, director of the Good Housekeeping Research Institute. “We are recognizing mainstream products making significant efforts in the right direction, and as advances are constantly being made in sustainability efforts, we will continue to reevaluate our green criteria on a regular basis.”

The product categories:

The first two categories being evaluated for the Green Good Housekeeping Seal are cleaning products and beauty products. Eventually they’ll be introducing other categories.

The green criteria:

For the current product categories, a product cannot earn the Green Good Housekeeping Seal if they contain “Certain harmful ingredients or any ozone-depleting compounds (ODCs) above 0.001%, produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) above a certain threshold, or have been tested on animals within the last five years (unless required by government regulation).” Specifically, there are a bunch of rules a product must adhere to, and the list of green criteria is long, but some examples include…

• Products containing Group 1 or 2A IARC carcinogen or under California Proposition 65 as causing reproductive and/or developmental toxicity at a weight of 0.001% or greater in a form that allows for a route of exposure in typical consumer use are not eligible.
• Any product that does not meet California’s Regulation for Reducing Volatile Organic Compound Emissions from Consumer Products is not eligible.
• Renewable energy in product manufacturing is assessed.
• They look for a reduction of water use in product manufacturing facilities vs. 2006.
• They conduct a comparative hazard assessment of ingredients
• They’re looking at sources of materials and ingredients, use of certified materials and ingredients, and use of recycled content in materials and ingredients.
• Biodegradability of products.
• Packaging considerations include – sources of packaging materials, use of recycled content in packaging, biodegradability of packaging, use of PVC in packaging, and recyclability of packaging.
• Greenhouse emissions are also looked at, for example, the product’s and company’s carbon footprint.
• A slew of corporate responsibility issues are assessed.
• And more.

Overall:

At first glance, I do like the criteria list that Good Housekeeping is using it’s very comparable to the issues I look at when I review green products. But I think that like many third party green certification folks, they’re missing one major piece of the puzzle. Coming up, we’ll take a look at the missing piece pluswhich products made the list and won the new Green Good Housekeeping Seal. Some are greenish, and some are fairly questionable.

Post from: Blisstree

Is the Green Good Housekeeping Seal Green?