EPA: Changes to Safer Choice Standard improve worker safety

Washington — Updates to an Environmental Protection Agency standard that outlines the criteria cleaning products must meet to earn the “Safer Choice” label will help protect workers, the agency says.

Products with the Safer Choice label use safer ingredients for people and the environment, per EPA, and those with the Design for the Environment logo help identify environmentally friendly disinfectants.

Changes to the standard, published Aug. 8 and effective immediately, include the development of a certification program for cleaning services that use Safer Choice- and Design for the Environment-certified products. The move is intended to boost the safety of workers who use the cleaning products and people who live or work in the spaces being cleaned, an agency press release states.

EPA also renamed the standard to the Safer Choice and Design for the Environment Standard, as well as strengthened sustainable packaging requirements and updated criteria for wipe products.

“We’ve updated EPA’s Safer Choice and DfE Standard for the first time in nearly a decade with feedback from our stakeholders to make it stronger, more transparent and to include updated packaging sustainability standards,” Jennie Romer, deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention in the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in the release.

EPA sought public comment on proposed updates in November. The update marks the agency’s first since 2015 and fourth since the standard was unveiled in 2009.