With the COVID-19 pandemic spurring many first-time producers to enter the market, the FDA has warned consumers to avoid hundreds of hand sanitizers because of high levels of hazardous ingredients including methanol (wood alcohol) and the contaminant 1-propanol. Meanwhile, even when properly formulated, hand sanitizers can include hazardous ingredients linked to cancer, allergies, and skin and eye irritation – even if they have an ecolabel.
With our new certification program, Green Seal is providing consumers, purchasers and facility managers a simple way to identify hand sanitizers that meet the highest standard for health, safety and performance.
The Highest Standard of Clean
Formulating with healthier ingredients is vital for a product that people apply to their skin dozens of times a day. Our new certification standard, created with input from public health and industry experts, screens 100% of alcohol-based hand sanitizer product formulas for:
- carcinogens
- reproductive toxins
- skin irritants
- phthalates
- parabens, and
- contaminants
And as always, consumers can be confident that Green Seal-certified products meet uncompromising performance standards, do not pollute waterways, and use environmentally preferable packaging materials.
Verification By a Trusted Authority
Our new hand sanitizer certification program is part of our commitment to leverage our expertise in healthy and sustainable cleaning and facility care to help protect people from both COVID-19 and negative health impacts from toxic chemicals.
- Green Seal’s Guidelines for Safer Cleaning and Disinfection for schools and workplaces have been adopted by commercial cleaning companies servicing more than 1 billion square feet of space.
- We’ve partnered with SEIU 32BJ, the largest union of property service workers in the U.S., on COVID-19 training for its members.
- More than 30,000 Green Seal certified products are used in offices, schools and homes each day, including cleaning products and hand soaps critical to de-contaminating buildings and protecting people.
Learn more about Green Seal certification for hand sanitizers here.
]]>Our Focus on Health
Since entering the US marketplace in the 1980s, hand sanitizers have provided an effective and efficient option for hand hygiene. US and international health organizations have called the use of alcohol-based hand sanitizers the second-best hand hygiene option, after hand washing with soap and water. Hand sanitizers are now critical to public health worldwide as governments and healthcare groups work to slow the spread of COVID-19.
However, hand sanitizers available on the US market are sometimes formulated with hazardous ingredients linked to cancer, allergies, skin and eye irritation, and other harmful health effects.
In addition, with sudden demand spurring many first-time producers to enter the market, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has warned consumers to beware of incorrectly formulated hand sanitizers. As of now, the FDA has listed 75 hand sanitizer products to avoid because they contain high levels of hazardous ingredients, like methanol.
Given the strong demand for these products and their critical role in providing safer, healthier spaces from schools to grocery stores, Green Seal has developed a health-protective framework for alcohol-based hand sanitizer certification.
Our Requirements
Green Seal’s proposed criteria for hand sanitizers set protective health requirements to provide purchasers and consumers a simple way choose safer and effective products.
Because people apply hand sanitizer directly to their skin up to 30 times a day, it is vital that products are formulated with healthier ingredients. Under the proposed requirements, certified hand sanitizers must be free of carcinogens, mutagens, reproductive toxins and endocrine disruptors, with additional ingredient restrictions to prevent skin irritation, eye damage and allergies.
As always, consumers can be confident that Green Seal-certified products:
- meet uncompromising performance standards
- conform to rigorous health requirements
- do not pollute waterways, and
- use environmentally preferable packaging materials
Final Criteria Coming Soon
Green Seal’s reputation for credibility and market impact rests on an open and transparent process for developing our science-based standards. All of our major standard revisions are open for review and public feedback. Green Seal publishes all formally submitted comments, as well as a response to each substantive issue identified by commenters.
Green Seal accepted public comments on the proposed criteria between July 30 and August 13. All comments are now under review, and Green Seal will publish a Response to Comments before issuing the Final Criteria for alcohol-based hand sanitizers.
The Proposed Criteria and supplementary documents can be reviewed on Green Seal’s Standard Projects page.
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