What’s That In Your Windex?

The strength of brands employed for household cleaning and polishing used to be measured by how clean and polished they rendered your home, but as environmental awareness goes further mainstream, even people who aren’t seeking “green” products want to know whether that bottle of Windex will create or exacerbate an illness or condition.

Lawmakers, an industry group, and environmentalists are wrangling—and are actually in agreement, mostly—over how and how many ingredients should be disclosed for each product. A major issue for the Procter & Gambles and Colgate-Palmolives is the fear that certain trade secrets (e.g., that lemon smell) will be revealed: Imagine the threat to McDonald’s if it had to list its “special sauce” ingredients on every Big Mac wrapper. (On the other hand, Coke is able to list ingredients without revealing its storied secret formula.)Continue reading...