Cleaning industry fears loss of EPA’s Safer Choice chemical program

Leaders across the cleaning product supply chain are sounding the alarm about the prospect of losing the Safer Choice program run by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Safer Choice is a voluntary label that identifies consumer products formulated using ingredients that have passed a rigorous set of health and environmental safety standards.

Industry insiders see the program as a possible target of a Donald J. Trump administration eager to cut government spending and regulation.

At the recent annual meeting of the American Cleaning Institute (ACI), an industry group, attendees voiced concerns about the potential threat to the program. “Eliminating Safer Choice could eliminate a large incentive for chemical manufacturers to utilize environmentally safer chemistries that also impact human health,” says Brian Sansoni, the ACI’s senior vice president for communications, outreach, and membership. “Consumers may either no longer have an option to target Safer Choice–labeled products or may lose consumer confidence under a privatized third-party program.”

The program is dominated by cleaning ingredients and finished cleaning products. Though it is popular with both industry and consumers, Safer Choice was named a target for shutdown or privatization in Project 2025, a detailed policy manifesto produced by a coalition of interest groups aligned with Trump. The EPA has about 800 chemicals on the program’s Safer Chemical Ingredients List and about 2,000 consumer products on its Safer Choice product list.

Registering a product with Safer Choice is a central part of marketing for sustainable chemistry in cleaning, says John Schierlmann, technical director at the chemical distributor IndSpyre Solutions. The program is funded mostly through fees paid by industry, he says, and has a budget of about $4 million. “It'll cost brands a lot more if they lose that mark, or if it becomes diluted and it means nothing to the consumer because it's become a pay-for-play sort of activity.”

The program has a reputation of being tough, fair, and not easily swayed by corporate interests. “It's independent, and it needs to stay that way,” Schierlmann says. “I'm working on a floor polish, and I've had to go backwards on three raw materials because they won't qualify,” he says. “That's good. This thing is going to be fully vetted out; it's going to be all safer chemistry.”

The cleaning industry isn’t just casually worrying about losing Safer Choice; it’s organizing to preserve the program. More than 200 chemical firms, consumer product firms, and retailers, along with industry and environmental advocacy groups, sent an open letter to the EPA today in support of Safer Choice.

“The Safer Choice label on products reassures consumers who are increasingly concerned about ingredient safety,” the letter says. “The label also helps US companies win business in global markets,” it says, because most Safer Choice listings are registered to US-based companies, and the label is internationally respected.

Schierlmann, who is also on the board of the industry group the Household and Commercial Products Association, says companies are concerned that selling Safer Choice to a private operator could make confidential formulation information vulnerable to mishandling. “Industry must be confident that the trade secrets that make its products innovative, safe and effective are not undercut by poor-quality counterfeit products,” the letter says.

Sansoni says Safer Choice supporters need to “raise their voices with members of Congress and to EPA, and through . . . societies and organizations they belong to that can maximize those voices in Washington.”

The Trump administration and Project 2025 did not respond to requests for comment.