Skin health and material health align in Purell® hand hygiene products
At a time when the principles of good hygiene are top of mind for all of us, hand hygiene products are in particularly high demand. As a leading provider of hand soaps and sanitizers GOJO, maker of the PURELL® brand, has made the safety, efficacy and responsibility of those products an equally high priority.
Since April 2020, over 350 global SKUs connected to PURELL® hand sanitizer and PURELL® Brand HEALTHY SOAP® with CLEAN RELEASE™ Technology have achieved Cradle to Cradle Certified™ Gold with a Platinum level performance in Material Health (the highest Material Health rating). These are the first Cradle to Cradle Gold certified hand sanitizers in the world and the first soaps sold in the US B2B marketplace to achieve this certification (not to mention the second Gold certified B2B soaps in the world).
According to Sustainability Manager Dylan Beach, their adoption of the Cradle to Cradle Certified Product Standard does far more than deepen the credibility of the company’s sustainability and climate-action efforts: Cradle to Cradle Certified helps deliver valuable third-party verification of the safety, efficacy and responsibility of GOJO products to customers while also providing an in-house roadmap for sustainable product development.
Because third-party certifications offer a trusted outside voice to help customers quickly identify a product with higher levels of environmental and social performance, Cradle to Cradle Certified is a sought-after certification for products across market sectors, including building materials, furniture, fashion, household and commercial cleaning products, and increasingly cosmetics and personal care products. Cradle to Cradle Certified is also recognized as a preferred product by Amazon, The Home Depot, Walgreens, Walmart, and a growing number of other retailers.
“As a leader in our industry in offering third-party certified products to our customers, Cradle to Cradle Certified was an obvious next step for us,” Beach states. “We seek third-party certifications in an effort to offer premier products without compromise, offering safe, effective, sustainable options to customers everywhere. Because Cradle to Cradle Certified demands a comprehensive analysis of all critical aspects of product sustainability [material health, product circularity, renewable energy and climate protection, water and soil stewardship and social fairness], it represents more than a mark of quality alone: it is also a process that leads companies like ours to make better products, better brands, and better communities.”
And as GOJO increasingly works to design products that support a more circular economy, the company knows optimizing the safety and circularity of its product ingredients and packaging is a critical building block: GOJO product formulators consider third-party certification requirements as part of the company’s innovation process, and the company’s hand hygiene and surface formulations are the result of decades of scientific innovation, using high-quality ingredients that are rigorously tested for both safety and efficacy.
“The Cradle to Cradle Certified Product Standard is the most robust third-party substantiation of this work,” says Beach. “Achieving Gold certification is a meaningful confirmation of the value of our own initiatives, like powering our Wooster, Ohio manufacturing facility with solar energy. Furthermore, our commitment to selecting safe, bio-based ingredients for our formulations and to making our formulations highly biodegradable helps us score Gold level performance in Product Circularity as well as helping us earn Platinum level Material Health performance. This gives us critical verification that the ingredients that go into our certified products are fully compatible with human and ecological health -- and that they are ready to cycle in a circular economy.”
“Cradle to Cradle Certified is one more pathway for us to continuously improve and innovate new solutions that help us live the GOJO Purpose of Saving Lives and Making Life Better through Well-being Solutions,” Beach said.
