By Robin Murphy
Walk down the cleaning aisle and the word natural is everywhere.
It’s usually accompanied by the appropriate wardrobe: a green leaf, a lemon, maybe some lavender, packaging in the general color family of oatmeal. Before you know much about what’s actually in the bottle, natural has already told you how you’re supposed to feel about it.
Safer.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, environmental claims on consumer products exploded. An EPA study found that the percentage of new products making environmental claims more than doubled between 1989 and 1992. Cleaning products were particularly enthusiastic participants. Laundry and cleaning products accounted for only about 4 percent of new product launches during that period but 20 percent of all environmental claims. By the first half of 1992, nearly half of new laundry and cleaning products carried some kind of environmental claim. (EPA)
In 1991, The Washington Post reported that the percentage of new household products making green claims had reached 25.9 percent. Seventh Generation, then primarily a mail-order business selling environmentally responsible products, had gone from mailing 80,000 catalogs in 1988 to 4.5 million in 1990. Green cleaning was becoming a business.
The Federal Trade Commission later described the late 1980s as a period of rapidly proliferating environmental claims, some of them deceptive. In 1992, working with the EPA and state attorneys general, the FTC issued the first Green Guides to help companies understand what they could and couldn’t claim about the environmental benefits of their products. (FTC)
The Guides eventually addressed claims including recyclable, compostable, degradable, free-of and non-toxic. The FTC says broad environmental claims can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to substantiate and advises companies to make specific claims instead. (FTC Green Guides summary)
But natural never got the kind of definition you might expect.
That’s especially interesting next to non-toxic. The FTC has specific guidance for that claim. A company making an unqualified non-toxic claim needs competent and reliable scientific evidence supporting it.
There isn’t a comparable FTC Green Guides standard that turns natural into a safety claim.
That doesn’t mean the FTC ignores the word. In 2016, the agency went after companies selling personal-care products as “all natural” or “100% natural” when the products actually contained synthetic ingredients. In other words, the FTC can challenge a factual claim that something is entirely natural when it isn’t. (FTC)
But that answers a different question.
What’s in this bottle?
It doesn’t answer the question many of us think natural answers:
Is this safer?
None of this is an argument for harsher chemistry. I avoid harsh, toxic chemicals. I don’t want unnecessary chemical exposure in my own home, and I don’t want it in anyone else’s either.
I just don’t think natural is enough information to make that decision.
I’ve seen someone choose vinegar because it felt like the gentler option and end up etching a marble counter. Vinegar really is natural. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that natural didn’t tell them what the vinegar would do.
It’s an acid.
The same problem shows up with essential oils. They come from plants, but concentrated oils are still concentrated chemicals. Some can irritate skin or eyes, and some can be toxic to pets, especially cats. Oil doesn’t necessarily have to be swallowed to become an exposure. It can settle on a cat’s coat from a diffuser or a wiped surface, and cats groom. (ASPCApro)
Natural isn’t the problem in either case. Neither is synthetic.
The problem is asking those words to answer a question they can’t answer.
What matters is what the substance actually does, how concentrated it is, how we’re exposed to it, what it might be mixed with and what we’re asking it to do.
Sometimes the right answer is vinegar. Sometimes it’s soap. Sometimes a job actually calls for a disinfectant. Sometimes water, agitation and a cloth are doing almost all the work.
I want the least hazardous chemistry that will actually do the job, used in the smallest amount that makes sense.
Thirty-five years after green claims started taking over the cleaning aisle, we’re still putting leaves on bottles.
A leaf can tell you what the manufacturer wants you to think about the product.
It can’t tell you whether it’s safe.
