Industry recognizes that “green” products are good business., They reduce pollution during manufacture and/or disposal. They reduce worker exposure to hazardous product constituent chemicals. And increasingly, they improve the bottom line. This triple bottom line accounting practice is rapidly becoming the standard for responsible businesses.

As a step in this direction, Ecolab has utilized the “Green” Product Compliance Analytical System (GP–CAS), from Chemical Compliance Systems, Inc., with its chemical-based 43 ecological, health, and safety criteria to evaluate 12 automatic dish, housekeeping and laundry product concentrate and ready-to-use (RTU) formulations for their “greenness.” We also evaluated three solvents as concentrates and dilutions. These analyses indicated that GP–CAS is sufficiently sensitive to document improved “greenness” for RTU formulations, when compared to their equivalent concentrates. A similar “green” differentiation occurred with the three solvent concentrates and their dilutions. Clearly, the “greenness” of a formulation is affected by its concentration. “Green” scores calculated for these formulations by GP–CAS were sufficiently wide to allow measurement of continuous improvement in “greenness.” These results emphasize the importance of product acquisition decisions being “risk-based,” instead of “hazard-based.” The availability of alternative constituents within GP–CAS makes this system equally valuable for product design and for product evaluation.