By Dylan Beach
Sustainability Manager, GOJO Industries

GOJO was founded 75 years ago on a safer way to clean hands, with the development of the first-ever one-step, rinse-off GOJO® Hand Cleaner as an alternative to the harsh solvents of the day that rubber factory workers used to remove tar and carbon black from their hands. We carry the same safe and effective design ethos forward with us today. Our formulations are based on decades of scientific innovation, using high-quality ingredients rigorously tested for safety and efficacy, like USP grade ethanol.

From 2015 through 2020, we advanced a sustainable chemistry strategy underpinned by two bold goals, one of which was to double the percent of global sales that come from third-party certified "green" products or products carrying an ecolabel.

Defining a standard

The federal government defines a "Green Product" (through Executive Order 13101) as a product or service that reduces health and environmental impacts compared to similar products and services used for the same purpose. Third-party certified "green" products take this to the next level and require a product to meet the criteria of an external standard.

Reputable ecolabel standards follow the ISO 14024 standard ("Environmental labels and declarations – Type I environmental labeling.”) Some standards address only a single attribute, like biobased content. Other standards address multiple attributes, such as ingredient safety, biodegradability, biobased content, impacts in manufacturing, social impacts, and/or packaging end of life. GOJO focuses on multi-attribute standards such as UL Ecologo and Cradle to Cradle Certified®.

Our journey begins

Our product certification journey began when GOJO was the first company in our industry to certify a hand soap to a third-party standard in 2006. We certified the world's first hand sanitizer in 2010. In fact, we worked with ECOLOGO to develop the first standard for the hand sanitizer product category.

That work continues today. In 2020, hundreds of PURELL® products achieved Cradle to Cradle Certified® Gold with a Platinum level Material Health rating, the highest material health rating possible. The Cradle to Cradle Certified® Products Program is the world's most advanced standard for safe, circular, and responsible materials and products.

Certification drives sustainable innovation

When we set our bold certification goal in 2015, 34% of our sales already came from certified products. At the end of 2020, 59% of our sales came from certified products. This massive jump represents dozens of innovative projects and the hard work of many GOJO team members who reformulated existing formulas and formulated new products with high sustainability performance.

One example is the reformulation of the top-selling GOJO® MULTI GREEN® into a green-certified heavy-duty hand cleaner, GOJO® MULTI GREEN® ECO. The product now not only uses sustainable scrubbing particles to remove dirt but also meets the USDA BioPreferred® Program and ECOLOGO certification requirements.

Third-party certifications make it easier for our customers to evaluate a products' health, safety, and environmental performance and help organizations buy green products with confidence. Significantly, certifications meet environmentally preferable purchasing guidelines of government contracts and green building standards such as LEED and WELL.

GOJO uses third-party certification standards as minimum benchmarks for product development and as a guide for innovation. When choosing ingredients for a new product or making ingredient changes to an existing product, our formulators know that meeting certification requirements is a must. Providing products that are increasingly safe, effective, and good for you and the planet helps deliver on our GOJO Purpose of Saving Lives and Making Life Better through Well-Being Solutions and helps meet the needs of our customers.

Ever-evolving guidelines drive our future

As a sustainability professional, I am excited by how third-party standards are not static. They evolve to become tougher to meet, raising the bar for sustainable products over time. To continue to meet third-party standards, a company needs to continuously improve and push the envelope. The Cradle to Cradle Certified® Products Program released its new Version 4.0 of the standard this year. As GOJO transitions its existing certified products to v4.0, GOJO products will need to meet the progressively higher benchmarks for achievement.

This continuous improvement process drives us towards a more sustainable future. It puts pressure today on our formulators, packaging engineers, GOJO team members in operations, and external partners in our supply chain to meet these higher standards tomorrow. Our next Sustainable Value Strategy and Goals will help us be ready for the challenge.