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ISSA Joins Coalition Urging Congress to Support EPA Safer Choice Program

ISSA has signed on to a letter to Congress expressing strong support for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Safer Choice Program. The association has been a longtime supporter of the program and is one of 90 signatories that came together, representing a unique and broad group of chemical manufacturers, brand owners, nongovernmental organizations, states, and municipalities.

In the letter, the coalition asks Congress to “provide funding at a level that allows the program to be fully staffed and resourced.” The letter highlights how companies across the value chain utilize the Safer Choice brand to advance their individual safer chemical initiatives, for example:

• Chemical manufacturers have invested in the difficult task of developing safer chemicals now listed on the Safer 2 Choice’s Safer Chemicals Ingredients List (SCIL). Having chemicals on the SCIL allows these manufacturers to offer best-in-class safer chemicals to the market that carry the robust third-party verification of the EPA.
• Brand owners and product manufacturers have invested in Safer Choice by undertaking the similarly resource-intensive effort to reformulate products using the SCIL to obtain Safer Choice certification.
• Major retailers specify the Safer Choice label to verifiably meet corporate goals laid out in public-facing chemicals policies.
• Numerous states and municipalities rely on Safer Choice because it is the only third-party program that requires all ingredients to be screened for hazards instead of simply using a restricted substances list. Several state and local governments specify Safer Choice labeled products in their purchasing contracts as well as point to Safer Choice in public education campaigns and outreach.
• Nongovernmental organizations and consumers find significant value in an authoritative government program that can be trusted to vet safer chemicals and products.

For questions regarding the EPA’s Safer Choice Program and ISSA advocacy, please contact ISSA Director of Government Affairs John Nothdurft. Please consider contributing to the ISSA Advocacy Fund in any amount to help us continue to advocate, influence, and impact environmental issues like this on behalf of the full spectrum of the cleaning industry.