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...

Verizon Wireless has gone to great lengths to tint its brand green. But as Ad Age reports, the mobile communications giant took a big step backwards when it enraged environmentalists by refusing to pull its sponsorship of a West Virginia Friends of America Rally over Labor Day weekend, organized by Massey Energy.

Why would environmentalists be upset? First, Massey Energy uses mountaintop removal, a coal mining process which involves chopping down forests, removing topsoil, and blasting away up to 1,000 feet of ground. Continue reading...