What inspired the launch of Podsy?

The Podsy Founding Families answered many important questions during development of Podsy Cleaning Systems. They all circled back to what is best for consumers’ wellness, pets, planet, pocketbook, and ultimately our families. The message is simple. You should not have to sacrifice quality when looking for an eco-value cleaning solution.

What does sustainability mean to Podsy?

At Podsy sustainability has two core principles: The health and wellness of consumers and their families along with products that enable reduction of waste and carbon neutrality. Our non-toxic formulas are child and pet safe, with 100% all-natural formulations coming soon. Podsy bottles are designed to be refilled and reused for years. This helps keep bottles and packaging out of landfills when compared to single-use bottles. They also use less shelf space and weigh much less than Ready-To-Use bottles. It’s better for you and our planet.

Why do you partner with Green Seal?

It was important to hold ourselves to a higher standard. Partnering with Green Seal allowed us to quickly understand where we can improve and where we will have success. Verification of 3rd party performance testing is also very important.

Why do you think consumers are responding to refillable cleaning systems right now? 

Refillable, and specifically pod-based refillable cleaning systems are coming of age for several reasons. After more than a decade of success within the laundry and dishwasher space, trust has grown. Changes in environment are clearer to many who may previously have been reluctant to embrace new products. Adoption is happening faster as value plays an impactful role. Refills are cheaper than buying bottles many times over. It’s an exciting time and consumers are driving the demand.

What value does third-party certification bring to a cleaning product?

To us, it’s important to signal that we have aligned ourselves with successful trusted experts specializing in household cleaners. We do more than just say we are sustainable. Our certifications validate successful results from ongoing testing. They allow us to continuously improve our product lines while measuring with the highest standards in leading our industry.

What accomplishment are you most proud of from a sustainability standpoint?

We’re proud of developing a cleaning system that eliminates Ready-To-Use (single-use) bottles at scale while increasing value for consumers and the efficacy of cleaners.

What’s next for Podsy?

Product development is ongoing and we are even more excited about our 2022 product lines. The Podsy Pure line of cleaners with all-natural ingredients and enhanced packaging across all product lines will further highlight our focus on sustainability.

ABCO Cleaning Products is a family owned, certified minority-business enterprise that manufactures a full range of high-quality mops and complementary tools used for everyday floor cleaning.

We recently transitioned our production facility to solar power, optimized our packaging to reduce corrugate box waste, and designed equipment to convert 100% post-industrial apparel waste into high-quality Natura Yarn cleaning products that are Green Seal Innovation Certified.

A key part of our business strategy is grounded in promoting circularity in the apparel sector by diverting more than 10 million pounds of material that would have been destined for landfills to Natura Yarns that are now used in more than 228 Green Seal-certified skus. 

Why do you partner with Green Seal?

We’ve seen a growing customer trend toward purchasing sustainable cleaning product alternatives. Aligning with Green Seal has elevated the brand equity of ABCO Products in the marketplace. Customers demand that products meet Green Seal’s standards – it has become a prerequisite for doing business. 

How do you use Green Seal in your customer marketing? 

Using the resources provided by Green Seal, including messaging, marketing materials and social media promotion, has generated increased business for ABCO Products on a national scale in multi-market segments, including industrial, fast food, educational and sanitary maintenance supply.

ABCO’s private label partners get access to all the same marketing benefits. They are able to use our Green Seal certification to sub-register products and use the mark on their labels, packaging and promotional materials. 

What’s next for ABCO? 

We’re focusing now on optimizing our PTS injection molding facility. This facility manufactures a variety of plastic cleaning tools that in 2020 converted more than 2.1 million discarded plastic bottles into brooms & brushes as part our portfolio of sustainable products. 

What does sustainability mean to Aqua Chempacs?

We are relentlessly focused on water-soluble innovation in the cleaning products world — not just to satisfy customer demand for sustainability, but also to help protect our planet. Over the last year alone, we have prevented 36 million bottles, the equivalent of 7 million pounds of plastic waste, from reaching landfills, oceans and water ways. Our mission is to make cleaning more sustainable and keep people and businesses safe, clean, and healthy.

Why do you partner with Green Seal?

Green Seal is a leader in recognizing green cleaning products. With their respected name and our shared commitment to safe, sustainable products, they are a natural fit with our philosophy of creating a healthier planet.

In our marketing, we not only tout the ease of use of our innovative products but also promote the benefits of having certified green formulations. Many of our customers request this.

Aqua Chempacs was an early leader in dissolvable concentrated cleaning products. Have you seen an uptick in interest in these types of products in the household consumer market?

We’ve been approached by numerous national brands to produce green, sustainable cleaning products. There has been a substantial increase in interest for dissolvable, concentrated packs. Today’s consumers not only recycle, but they also think that companies should take the lead. Plastic waste is a top consumer concern — especially when it ends up in landfills, oceans and waterways.

What innovations are you most proud of from a sustainability standpoint?

Traditional cleaning product packaging (premixed liquids in single use plastic containers) has worked for the past 100 years or so, keeping people safe and businesses up and running. It also brings some major problems — namely plastic waste and carbon emissions. 91% of plastics are not recycled, and much of that ends up in landfills and oceans. We need to stop thinking only about what we can do with plastic waste once it’s created, and instead think about what we can do to prevent it from being created in the first place. We take great pride knowing our 100% dissolvable packs replace heavy, outdated conventional products with lightweight packaging and the concept of keeping your bottle for future use. Every time an Aqua ChemPac bottle is reused, that is one less bottle polluting the environment!

What’s next for Aqua Chempacs?

Innovation is our focus and Aqua ChemPacs proudly continues to research new, sustainable packaging materials and formulations. We are also launching a consumer focused brand to complement our industrial line. To help accomplish this, Aqua ChemPacs is moving into a new, state of the art facility…7 times larger than our current home!

We believe we not only sell a product but a “system”. This system delivers on a key principle that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. This concept has met great success and cost savings with our retail chain customers in the form of custom cleaning kits. We believe, along with being “green”, our water-soluble technology will meet equal success with the consumer as well.

Managing food service waste in a convention center is an immense challenge. Chicago’s McCormick Place, the largest convention center in the Americas, draws almost 3 million visitors each year. SAVOR… Chicago takes the responsibility and opportunity to manage our business sustainably very seriously, a commitment that led us to be the first convention center in the world to receive Green Seal certification for sustainable restaurant and food services. Sustainability is embedded in everything we do. One of our most exciting challenges is to seek out new innovations that enable us to drive continual improvements. Every year, more than 30% of our country’s food supply — 133 billion pounds – is sent to landfills, where it emits potent methane gas into the atmosphere instead of feeding millions of people. As the official food service provider of McCormick Place, SAVOR…Chicago has more than doubled our waste diversion rates since 2011. While much of this increased diversion comes through food donations within our community and visitor education, we’re also undertaking new approaches like the Grind2Energy food-waste-recycling system.

Making its McCormick Place debut this week at the 2019 National Restaurant Association Show, our Grind2Energy system will allow us to divert nearly 100% of pre-consumer organic waste. Grind2Energy’s technology combines a specialized grinder that processes food trim and scraps into slurry that will be stored onsite, in a safely sealed 8,000 gallon tank. As needed, the slurry is transported to a local anaerobic digestion facility, where microbes will break down the material to extract methane for energy production and to produce a nutrient-rich fertilizer. Minimizing waste is a challenge we fight daily through steps large and small; adding this tool that both eliminates waste and creates usable energy is a win for all of us. Also at the National Restaurant Association Show, SAVOR…Chicago is pleased to launch a new Green Seal promotion to the show’s more than 40,000 attendees and food industry leaders through digital menu messaging promoting Green Seal certification. We have found that education is one of the most powerful tools available to help spread the message that we can do so much more with less.  

Doug Bradley is Vice President of Culinary at SAVOR. He leads SAVOR’s talented team of 80+ chefs around the country and also manages SAVOR…Chicago. Classically trained as a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, Doug has 20+ years of industry experience in high profile organizations.

Americans throw out 68 million tons of paper each year – that’s 417 pounds per person. Until this year, the U.S. could handle this immense volume by shipping one-third of our waste to China, but due to new Chinese policies, almost all of that refuse is now staying in the US and going straight to our landfills. The paper that we recycle each day shouldn’t be sitting in landfills when it can be processed and used to create new products – but it will continue to pile up unless we rise to the challenge by choosing paper products made from recycled material.

Facility Managers and Procurement Pros: You have an important role to play

Lower your building’s environmental footprint and help all of us tackle the paper waste challenge by making greener purchasing choices, like choosing Green Seal certified sanitary paper products to make sure that you’re getting the highest percentages of post-consumer recycled content.

This simple choice will immediately lower the environmental impact of your building operations and clearly demonstrate a facility-wide commitment to solving our national paper waste issue and to conserving precious natural resources – our forests. Green Seal has made it simple for you to make the greenest choice because we’ve done the hard work. We’ve conducted extensive research to ensure that our standards accurately reflect the highest levels of leadership on today’s market: the greenest feasible fiber content, a chlorine-free papermaking process, a low energy and water-use manufacturing process, ingredients that are significantly safer for human health, and verified performance that users appreciate.

Over the last 20 years, more and more manufacturers have stood up to our challenge – and undergone our thorough certification process – to prove that their sanitary paper products meet each of the 12 major best practices that Green Seal has identified as key impacts within the product lifecycle. The results of your greener paper purchases can be ballparked with help from the Environmental Paper Network. According to Portland’s Sustainability At Work program, For a 120-person office, over one year, your company will save 8,700 trees, 1 million pounds of emissions (the equivalent of removing 100 cars from the roads), and 5.6 million gallons of water. Those green brags are easy wins that you can include in your annual sustainability metrics report.

Continuous Improvement in Environmental Benchmarking

To make sure that we’re supporting today’s environmental challenges, Green Seal implemented a major review of the GS-1 standard, and today we’re relaunching it as Edition 6.2.

With direct feedback from manufacturers and end users, the standard is now more in-line with industry practices. We’ve removed the unintentional barriers to certification, expanded number of pathways for compliance, improved the readability of the standard, and maintained the stringent level of protections for human health and our environment. With these improvements, we are now off to the races, setting the stage for a major shift in this industry. With feasible leadership standards, Green Seal is incentivizing higher rates of landfill diversion and certifying a wider selection of bath tissue, paper napkins, tray liners, and other sanitary paper products that we use every day. Purchasing Green Seal-certified products is a simple choice that can have tremendous impact on our environment. From facility managers to restaurant owners to everyday consumers, making simple changes in our purchasing habits can help significantly reduce waste and stabilize the U.S. recycled paper market. We urge you to join us in making this change, because it’s up to us to reduce our waste footprint and ensure that we have a healthy planet for generations to come.

• Standards
• Minimize Waste
• Sanitary Paper