What Makes an Industry Endure?
What gives the cleaning products industry staying power? It is not only the products on the shelf, but the stewardship behind them: responsible product development, scientific integrity, earned trust, shared knowledge and a willingness to work collaboratively with regulators for a system everyone can depend on.
That stewardship is a form of leadership, exercised not in a single bold stroke, but consistently over decades. Few programs illustrate these principles better than the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Safer Choice and Design for the Environment (DfE)—voluntary partnership programs for cleaning and other products.1 These programs’ three-decade history demonstrates how thoughtful collaboration can help innovation endure.
Today, the EPA applies the Safer Choice label to qualifying cleaning and other chemical products, while the DfE label identifies qualifying antimicrobial products, such as disinfectants.
Responsible product development
Speed gets attention. But the most consequential innovation in a regulated industry is rarely measured by speed alone; it is measured by deliberate progress. Safer Choice/DfE, an EPA Pollution Prevention (P2) program, partners with manufacturers to certify cleaning and other products with ingredients that are safer for human health and the environment. When consumers see the Safer Choice/DfE logo on a product, they can be confident it has been evaluated against the EPA’s stringent program criteria.2
Partnerships like this take time. Innovation without sufficient rigor can lead to reformulations, inconsistent testing and marketplace confusion. Long-lasting, impactful industries understand that “responsible” is not the opposite of “innovative.” It is what makes innovation durable, creating products consumers can trust and benefit from.
Scientific integrity
Underlying every Safer Choice/DfE label is a rigorous scientific framework for evaluating product ingredients, developed by a community of scientists and leaders against established human health and environmental criteria. Since the EPA’s inception of the program in the 1990s, it has evolved through sustained engagement among manufacturers, trade associations, independent scientists, environmental advocates and government regulators. This collaborative effort underpins the program’s scientific foundation and credibility.
Across multiple administrations and three decades of chemical innovation, the program has notably maintained the same core coalition of stakeholders.
Industries that endure recognize scientific integrity as a shared asset and invest in the collective infrastructure that allows innovation to thrive.
Customer trust
Trust is not built through a single campaign or product launch. It compounds over time through clear labeling, honest marketing and claims that hold up under scrutiny.
The scale of the Safer Choice/DfE program demonstrates the value of that trust. Today, more than 400 businesses participate in the program, and more than 2,000 certified products are available in the United States and beyond. In a marketplace crowded with product claims and increasingly complex labels, recognizable certifications can help consumers identify products that meet established criteria. Industries that endure treat customer trust as one of their most valuable assets and prioritize getting the fundamentals right, consistently over time.
Knowledge sharing
Much of an industry’s knowledge lives in its people, not databases. Talented people retire, change jobs and take decades of expertise with them. That is why well-established programs, like Safer Choice/DfE, prioritize institutional memory, education and mentoring. Without effective knowledge transfer, industries risk spending time and resources rediscovering lessons already learned.
Stewardship means treating today’s expertise as tomorrow’s infrastructure. ISSA has embraced this principle through its Making Safer Choices initiative and Community of Practice, the Safer Choices Forum, which helps equip manufacturers, distributors, retailers, purchasers and other stakeholders with evidence-based guidance across the cleaning value chain.3 Its goals include documenting the training of one million workers, standardizing the lexicon of cleaning, and making the scientific connection between cleaning, health, safety and sustainability.
The similar names are no accident. ISSA’s forum builds upon the EPA’s Safer Choice program, extending the same stewardship ethos across the cleaning value chain. Industries that endure foster communities that share best practices, preserve institutional knowledge and create new knowledge faster than any one organization could alone.
Industry advocacy
No company operates in isolation, and neither does an industry.
Government programs function best when stakeholders engage constructively and bring coordinated, credible perspectives to the policymaking process. That engagement is especially important for sustaining voluntary programs like Safer Choice/DfE and ensuring they remain functional, trusted and grounded in science.
Last year offered a clear example. When questions arose about the future of the Safer Choice/DfE program, a coalition of businesses, trade associations and nonprofit organizations joined together in a letter conveying their united support.4
The signatories ranged from multinational manufacturers to small businesses across the country—a breadth of support no single company or organization could have achieved on its own.
Building on that coalition support, in June 2026, HCPA led the industry’s push to successfully introduce bipartisan legislation to formally authorize the Safer Choice/DfE program.5 This kind of coordinated response—competitors and other stakeholders aligning around a shared interest in a functional, trusted federal program—is collective stewardship in action. It requires collaboration, compromise and patience, and demonstrates what an industry can accomplish when stakeholders work together toward a common goal.
The stewardship behind the products
Responsible product development, scientific integrity, customer trust, knowledge-sharing and industry advocacy form the infrastructure of an industry built to endure.
Legacy is not something an industry can claim for itself. It is ultimately defined by the consumers, workers, policymakers and future generations who experience the results of its decisions.
Products will be reformulated, technologies will change and regulatory frameworks will evolve. What endures is not any single innovation, but the stewardship behind it.
