SC Johnson upped the ante on public chemical disclosures last year when it began listing all of its fragrance ingredients online. Now the company has taken another big step towards complete chemical transparency by naming all 368 ingredients in its products that could trigger an allergic reaction.
The decision comes amid a larger industry-wide trend in transparency but is a bigger step than most companies have chosen to make.
"We understand that other companies might choose not to do the work to communicate low levels of potential skin allergens in their products," Fisk Johnson, chairman and CEO, said. "With our decades-long commitment to being more and more transparent, we are continuing on a path to provide more and more information to the people who buy our products.”
In order to identify which chemicals could be a skin allergen, analysts at the company studied more than 3,000 data sets from public and industry sources. The list they came away with includes both natural and synthetic ingredients.
The company is also only listing ingredients present at a level set by an EU standard that stipulates that a “dose of less than 0.01 percent is unlikely to cause a reaction for most skin allergens in rinse-off products.”
Other home product companies, such as Unilever, have also increased transparency efforts in recent years. According to Bloomberg BNA, some of the skin allergens identified by the EU include benzyl alcohol, citronellal, farnesol, hydroxycitronellal, linalool and oakmoss extract.
Just like SC Johnson did with its disclosure of fragrance ingredients, the listing will only be online — not on the actual labels of the products. The listings will be available starting next year.
SC Johnson makes a variety of home care cleaning products and has several major brands including Windex, Pledge, Drano, Baygon, Off!, and Glade.
