A Family Company

S.C. Johnson's new Greenlist products may be misleading consumers into thinking that their products have been tested by a neutral third party for their "green-ness" when in fact, they haven't.

Within the past year, green banners that sport the title "Greenlist" have sprouted up across the cleaning products of S.C. Johnson, the most popular being Windex and Shout. According to Christopher Beard, the company's public affairs director, the label has enabled the company to eliminate almost 48 million pounds of volatile organic compounds from their products in the last five years (greenbaypressgazette.com).

While this proves to be a true statement, S.C. Johnson has gone around informing it's consumers of their attempts to be green in illegal and deceitful ways. Greenlist is a "rating system used to evaluate and reduce adverse environmental effects of chemical ingredients" (mycleaningproducts.com). What S.C. Johnson doesn't tell the consumers is that this "rating system" is a patent owned by none other than S.C. Johnson. 158. While S.C. Johnson denies that their labeling is misleading, the complaints brought against the company bring up the fact that the only place that the Greenlist insignia is located on their products is on the back of opaque bottles and on the inside of clear bottles (mycleaningproducts.com). Even the insignia doesn't explain that the Greenlist "rating system" is owned by S.C. Johnson; it misleads the consumer into thinking that a neutral third party has tested the products and decided that they were environmentally friendly, which is not the case. 


Even with all of these complaints against their company, S.C. Johnson remains confident in their ability to win these lawsuits. However, they are starting to reword their disclosures on the Greenlist system. Before, their disclosure said, "Greenlist is a rating system that promotes the use of environmentally responsible ingredients" and now it says, "Greenlist: Our patented process to select raw materials with reduced environmental impact while maintaining high performance"(mycleaningproducts.com). I believe that S.C. Johnson has respectable ideas on going green, they just need to be more open about them.




Resources: http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/article/20110210/GPG03/102100594/1247/S.C.-Johnson-s--Greenlist--labeling-deceptive--lawsuit-claims
http://www.mycleaningproducts.com/articles/change-of-s-c-johnsons-labeling.html