The Sustainable Earth® Story 

Coastwide Labs Pursues the Formulation of the Sustainable Earth® Product Line after Customer Comments Regarding Health, Safety, and the Environment

Researchers at Coastwide Laboratories knew that many traditional commercial cleaning products contained a variety of hazardous ingredients.

They also knew that some of those chemicals distributed potential hazards into the air and down the drain and into the lungs and eyes and skin and bodies of people and animals.

When customers in the 1980s started to raise concerns, the vice president of technical services and product development at Coastwide Laboratories knew the company faced a fork in the road. Roger McFadden says the company could have responded in either of two ways.

It could have ignored the concerns and maintained the status quo.

Or it could do what it did — change, big time, for the better.

Today, the company is recognized for development of the Sustainable Earth® standard — the commercial cleaning industry’s most stringent standard for evaluating environmental, health and safety impacts of cleaning products.

Having raised the bar, Coastwide Laboratories then developed the Sustainable Earth® line of cleaning products. An independent laboratory has certified seven of those products as meeting criteria for either Gold or Silver levels of the standard.

Along the way, Coastwide Laboratories has removed or reduced such chemicals as formaldehyde, methylene chloride, phosphates, 2-butoxyethanol and assorted other toxins.

And it has replaced them with ingredients from milk, soybeans, citrus fruits — and hydrogen peroxide, the common household antiseptic sometimes used to bleach hair blond.

“My customers buy Sustainable Earth® because it’s a better product than the one they’re using,” says Scott Casey, a partner in the Marfield Scott Agency of Seattle, which handles cleaning supplies. “There’s a need for these products in the marketplace. Customers just want them to work.”

Coastwide began its journey to a more sustainable line of products, driven by the market’s desire for the functionality that had been missing from first-generation “green” products.

Large industrial customers, especially in the high-tech sector, were also asking for full disclosure of the chemicals in cleaning products, out of concern for the health impacts on people who worked in the buildings where those products were used.

“It challenged us to look deeper into the chemicals we were using in our products and to provide full disclosure of ingredients,” McFadden says.

About the same time, school districts began to raise concerns about children, teachers and other users of their facilities. Odors and chemical residue from cleaning were suspected of causing allergic reactions.

“We stepped up and said, ‘How do we help you?’” McFadden recalls. “We designed a general purpose classroom cleaner with no dyes and no fragrance for the Salem schools.”

Jim Jenny, custodial supervisor for the Salem-Keizer Public Schools, says the district is still using the Gold-certified Sustainable Earth® general purpose cleaner. “It performs really well compared to other products in the past,” he says.

While looking at its own chemical use, Coastwide realized it could apply that standard to products from other manufacturers.

By adopting one of the industry’s first “gatekeeper” policies, Coastwide reserved the right not to sell any product that didn’t meet clearly defined health and safety criteria.

Grant Watkinson, president of Coastwide Laboratories, says the decision hurt financially when the company chose to stop making products containing 2-butoxyethanol.

“It’s a very inexpensive ingredient used in a lot of cleaning products, but we took it out because of its potentially adverse health effects” he says.

McFadden says taking that stand helped drive other manufacturers to change their formulations. “Because of us, a leading national chemical manufacturer came out with a non-butyl wax-stripper,” he says.

The story illustrates McFadden’s belief that the industry shouldn’t rely on government regulation, but should lead change from within.

“What we need is a cleaning industry with an environmental conscience and a commitment to community sustainability and doing the right thing,” he says.

Its own incremental steps led Coastwide in 1998 to embark on a concerted effort to reinvent some of its more than 100 products.

McFadden knew he had to overcome marketplace resistance, by producing products that were competitively priced and performed as well as non-green products.

An extensive global research project ensued. He studied the formulations of existing products with “green” characteristics. He looked at chemical databases. And he researched suppliers of chemicals that had potential to support a green product line.

Along the way, Coastwide partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Design for the Environment program, and supplied data about cleaning product chemicals to the Indiana Relative Chemical Hazard Score database developed by Purdue University.

Working through the Portland-based Zero Waste Alliance, Coastwide helped found the Pacific Northwest’s Unified Green Cleaning Alliance, a group of businesses that produce, sell or use cleaning products.

Those relationships helped develop the industry’s most comprehensive understanding of cleaning products and their constituent chemicals.

McFadden began seeking alternatives that would clean without putting people or the environment at risk.

“You start asking: What is it that sustains life on this planet?” McFadden says.

He started looking at foods, which led him to companies that had developed polyglycoside surfactants from sugar — and oils from soybeans, and lactates from milk, and solvents from citrus products.

By combining some of those chemicals with hydrogen peroxide, McFadden realized a multiplier effect — stable chemical combinations that cleaned five or six times better.

“That was an artistic move on our part,” he says. “We’re building on what’s already there. We select ingredients that the planet provides and rearrange them into truly sustainable products..”

Watkinson says the Sustainable Earth™ product line emerged from his involvement in 2000 and 2001 with McFadden on former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s Community Sustainability Council.

“I think the exposure to the Council opened our eyes a bit more, and we realized that there is other stuff we can do and should do – let’s explore it,” Watkinson says. “That’s what created the product line.”

Coastwide submitted its products to Coffey Laboratories in Portland for independent review against the Sustainable Earth™ standard. In June 2002, the original seven products in the Sustainable Earth® line received that certification.

“Two main criteria are critical when selecting a third-party certifier — scientific expertise, and avoiding conflicts of interest,” says McFadden.

Launch of the Sustainable Earth® line is just the start, according to company president Watkinson. He says he agrees with McFadden’s dream of evolving all Coastwide products to the Sustainable Earth™ standard.

“That would be desirable, and an objective,” he says. “It depends on advances in chemistry. But we have to differentiate ourselves from our competition, and this is part of that — our commitment to sustainable chemistry.”