San Francisco Chronicle (Calif.), January 14, 2008

CLOROX EXPECTS GREENBACKS FROM GREEN CLEANERS

[Rachel's introduction: Clorox has launched a new line of cleaning products called Green Works, which will carry the logo of the Sierra Club. In return, Clorox will pay the club an undisclosed fee based partly on sales.]

By Ilana DeBare, Chronicle Staff Writer

Clorox bleach and Liquid-Plumr will gain some unlikely siblings today - a line of green cleaning products.

The Clorox Co., the Oakland [California] firm that introduced bleach to American households a century ago, is adding a series of natural, biodegradable household cleaners called Green Works to its $4.8 billion family of cleaning and household products.

As the first major consumer products firm to launch such a line, Clorox has the potential to move green cleaning products beyond the niche of Whole Foods-type stores and into the wider world of Wal-Marts and suburban supermarkets.

And its new Green Works products will carry the logo of the Sierra Club -- a partnership that may raise eyebrows among some of the club's members.

"We'll definitely have some folks who are surprised by this decision, but also people who are pretty excited about it," said Sierra Club spokeswoman Orli Cotel. "We are supporting Green Works in hopes that more people will have access to these kinds of products, some of which aren't even available in the middle of the country."

Analysts said Clorox 's commitment to Green Works -- the company's first new brand in 20 years -- is the latest evidence that environmentally friendly products are going more mainstream.

"This is a kind of watershed moment," said Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com, who did some consulting work for Clorox on Green Works. "We finally have major consumer companies taking the green marketplace seriously, and not as an afterthought."

Small companies like Seventh Generation and San Francisco's Method Products have made natural cleaning products for years. But they amount to only a tiny sliver of the market.

Americans spent over $432 million on all-purpose cleaners in 2007 - but only 1 percent of that went to Method and 0.3 percent went to Seventh Generation, according to Information Resources Inc.

By comparison, Clorox makes three brands of conventional all-purpose cleaners -- Pine-Sol, Clorox Clean-Up and Formula 409 -- that together raked in 41 percent of consumer sales.

"There are four reasons this (green) category has been held back," said Matt Kohler, Clorox 's brand manager for Green Works. "There's a perception that natural products don't work. They've been very expensive. People often have to go to special stores to get them. And there's not a brand that consumers know and trust."

But the green market started looking increasingly attractive to Clorox, , which manufactures STP auto care products, Hidden Valley salad dressings, Glad plastic bags and Brita water filters along with cleaning brands such as Liquid-Plumr and Pine-Sol.

That's because the overall $2.7 billion market for household cleaning products isn't growing -- but the green niche is.

Sales of natural cleaning products rose by 23 percent between 2006 and 2007, according to SPINS, a market research and consulting firm for the natural products industry.

And Clorox 's own research concluded that almost half of all consumers would be interested in natural cleaning products if they were as effective as traditional ones.

So company scientists set about creating cleaners that were at least 99 percent natural, biodegradable, nontoxic, made from plant- and mineral-based ingredients rather than petroleum, and not tested on animals.

Clorox chose to keep its own logo on the Green Works label -- unlike companies like Colgate-Palmolive, which bought Tom's of Maine, the natural toothpaste maker, in 2006 but leaves all mention of its ownership off of Tom's product labels.

The idea was to reassure customers who are leery of natural products that they would clean as well as Clorox 's more familiar brands. "We're putting the Clorox logo prominently on the label to communicate that this is a trusted source," Kohler said.

But Clorox also sought some way to reassure customers that its environmental claims were genuine, and not just hype or "greenwashing."

It received certification as a safer product by the Design for the Environment program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And it approached the Sierra Club for permission to include the club's logo on Green Works labels, beginning this spring.

The Sierra Club asked several of its volunteer committees to review Green Works and ended up approving the use of its logo -- the first time it has given its blessing to a household cleaning product. In return, Clorox will pay the club an undisclosed fee based partly on sales.

"We hope we are transforming the marketplace by doing this," said Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope. "These products are clean, they're green, they're not going to hurt you, and they're not going to hurt the environment."

However, some other activist groups raised questions about Clorox 's overall environmental commitment -- given that its Green Works products remain outnumbered by its conventional cleaners.

"We'd like to see them incorporate these practices into all their products," said Erin Thompson, campaign organizer for Women's Voices for the Earth, a Montana-based group that advocates for fewer chemicals in cleaning products. "Why sell one set of products that have hazardous ingredients and others that don't?"

Some environmental experts questioned the Sierra Club 's decision to back Green Works without a standardized review process that applies to other products, too.

"It sounds risky both to Clorox and the Sierra Club ," said Scot Case of TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, which runs a Canadian program called EcoLogo that sets environmental standards for products. "I would want to know exactly how the Sierra Club made its determination. Unless they are going to publish the standard that products have to meet, it sounds like a form of greenwashing."

As part of today's product launch, Clorox will undertake a nationwide advertising campaign for Green Works. The products -- which include a general purpose cleaner, window cleaner, toilet bowl cleaner, dilutable cleaner and bathroom cleaner -- will be available in 24,000 stores nationally, including Safeway and Wal-Mart.

Colleen Ryan, an analyst for the consumer products research firm Mintel, predicted that Green Works will draw buyers away from conventional cleaning products rather than from other natural products.

"I suspect that most of the people who will be attracted to this are not people who are buying Seventh Generation, but more mainstream Wal- Mart shoppers with an interest in buying green," Ryan said. "If handled right, this has huge sales potential."

Seventh Generation president Jeffrey Hollender predicted that other major consumer product firms will also announce green cleaning lines in 2008. But he denied feeling threatened by his new Goliath-size rivals.

"New competitors will only help this category grow faster than it's been growing," said Hollender, whose Vermont firm has been selling natural household products for more than 15 years. "The question is, do you want a big piece of a small pie or a small piece of a big pie? We absolutely want the pie to be as big as possible, even if we have a smaller slice.... To address problems environmentally, we need to get other businesses involved."

How to know if cleaners are really green It can be challenging for consumers to figure out which cleaning products are truly safer and better for the environment.

Unlike foods that are designated as organic, there is no government standard for products that call themselves "natural." Nor does the government require companies to list the ingredients of cleaning products on their labels.

Clorox lists the ingredients of its Green Works cleaners, for instance, but not its conventional products.

What should consumers do? One approach is to make your own cleaning products out of benign ingredients like vinegar, lemon juice and baking soda.

Another is to look for products that do list their ingredients on the package. The Green Guide, an online publication of National Geographic, suggests choosing products that contain plant-based alcohol instead of other solvents, and plant-oil disinfectants such as eucalyptus, rosemary or sage.

The Green Guide also lists some cleaning ingredients to avoid, such as volatile organic compounds and glycol ethers. Women's Voices for the Earth, an activist group based in Montana, published a July 2007 report listing cleaning products with potentially hazardous ingredients.

What's in a cleaner? More than 99% of the ingredients in Clorox 's new Green Works products come from natural, nonpetrochemical sources. Here are the ingredients in Green Works' all-purpose cleaning spray, and how they compare with conventional cleaning products:

-- Water. This is a primary ingredient in any cleaner.

-- Alkyl polyglucoside. This is a surfactant, or a chemical that reduces the surface tension of the cleaning solution so it can get under dirt and lift it up. Many conventional cleaning products use surfactants made from petrochemicals, but alkyl polyglucoside comes from coconut oil.

-- Ethanol SDA-3C. This is a solvent to help dissolve dirt and keep the solution stable. Conventional cleaning products often use petroleum-based solvents such as glycol ethers. The ethanol in Green Works comes from corn oil.

-- Glycerine. This is another solvent, also made from corn oil.

-- Lemon oil. This provides fragrance and comes from lemon peel.

-- Preservative (Kathon). This is derived from petrochemicals and is part of the 1 percent of Green Works' spray that is not made from natural, renewable ingredients. However, unlike some other preservatives, it will biodegrade within 28 days.

-- Milliken Liquitint Blue HP dye and Bright Yellow dye X. These are also made from petrochemicals and are part of the 1 percent of the product that is not natural. These dyes give the spray its light green color.

Source: Clorox Co.

Memo: E-mail Ilana DeBare at idebare@sfchronicle.com.

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