Consumers and workers have the right to know what is in cleaning products so that we can make decisions about the products we buy and use every day. Ingredient disclosure on product labels is mandatory for food, cosmetics and drugs – but not cleaning products.
Without a disclosure law, consumers are left in the dark.
Chemicals found in some cleaning products are known to cause cancer, birth defects, asthma and other serious health effects. For example,“fragrance” masks any mixture of > 3,000 chemicals and can contain harmful chemicals such as styrene, phthalates, and synthetic musks. Full ingredient lists are useful for consumers; more and more consumers are reading labels. They are eager and have the right to know the ingredients in the products they use in their home. They are used to picking up a bottle of shampoo and looking through a list of long chemical names to find the one or two ingredients of interest to them.
A 2015 (Influence Central) survey of 1,000 U.S. moms found that 73% of those surveyed, “often do research to understand the safety of ingredients to which their family is exposed.”
AB 708 would require cleaning product manufacturers to put ingredients on:Product labels: The first 20 ingredients by weight and hazardous chemicals on the DTSC’s Safer Consumer Products Program’s Candidate Chemicals list. AB 708 protects confidential business information (CBI) by allowing manufacturers to hide the exact formulas (concentrations) of their products- it only requires them to list the ingredients