 Oh my goodness, you're not gonna believe it. But when I got started back in the cleaning business about 30 years ago, I thought that I could go up and down the grocery aisle shelves. I know what you're thinking. You've done the same thing, right? You go up and down the grocery aisle shelves and you get bamboozled by all this fancy packaging of cleaning supplies. And you're like, oh yeah, I saw this on TV. I should buy this. And so you buy it and you try it. You're kind of experimenting with it. And then you go back to buy more supplies and you see new cleaning chemicals. And you're like, oh, I gotta get me some of those, right? Well, it wasn't too long into my cleaning business before all of a sudden I noticed that I had chemical sensitivities where my eyes would turn red just by the cleaning chemicals that I was using. And then by the end of the day, my nose was like, you know, woofy and I couldn't breathe properly. And so going to work every single day and not factoring to the fact that if I was gonna be in the cleaning industry for 10 or 15 or 20 years that I was gonna be responsible for my own physical wellbeing and the cleaning chemicals that I used, right? And so somewhere along the way, I started looking for a safer choice, a cleaner choice of cleaning chemicals. And so today we're gonna have a really fantastic conversation. And this is one of the conversations. If I had all the conversations I could ever have with you, this would be one of the most important conversations we can have together. And it's gonna be a very short conversation. We've got about 30 minutes here today and I have with me today a really special guest. This is Jenny Romer and she is the Assistant Administrator. She's the Deputy Administrator. I can't even read this. Assistant Administrator for Pollution Prevention at EPA's Office of Chemical Safety. I'm gonna put this up here on the screen so you can read it. And that shortened stands for OCSPP. And in this role, she oversees several programs. One of them is the prevention program, the pollution prevention program, the P2 program, and it includes the preferable purchasing, the safer choice programs, the green chemistry awards, a whole bunch of stuff, okay? The reason that I'm excited to have her here today is because of her experience and because of her education in the safer choice program. So I'm gonna bring her up on camera and I'm super excited. I know you guys have a lot of questions I do too. We're gonna bring her up here and get her to answer, if she will, some questions about the safer choice program. So thank you guys so much for being here today. I know we've got a lot of folks already. I see Bruce is here. I see Melanie is here. And with that, I see Jenny Romer. Jenny, how are you today and welcome? Hi, thanks so much for having me. So tell me a little bit about how you got started in the safer choice program. I know that you have the experience from the pollution that you've done in the past before the safer choice, you were part of the EPA's program. Before the EPA, you were part of the surfrider foundation. Share with us about that and how you came to the EPA. Sure, so I'm the deputy assistant administrator for pollution prevention. I think you were trying to give me a little bit of a promotion earlier, being the assistant administrator. But I'm the DAA for pollution prevention. I have a back, my background is as a lawyer working mostly on plastic pollution prevention policies. And I have an undergrad degree, a couple of them, one of them's in biology. I also spent some time working on litigation focusing on cases related to green marketing claims. So the kind of claims you'd see going down the aisle at the grocery store. And I also worked for the surfrider foundation for a few years, leading their plastic pollution initiative that's representing surfers and protecting the ocean. That was right before joining EPA. And I'm also a mom. I have a two year old daughter and a 12 year old stepdaughter. I kind of background for this show. I clean my house. And I spent a tiny bit of time as a house cleaner. I have hired a couple of house cleaners in the past to give some kind of context for what I'm bringing to the picture here. I'm here to talk about Safer Choice, which is a label that I oversee as part of my position at EPA. And that Safer Choice label really helps people find cleaning products with safer ingredients for people and for the planet, which is a part of EPA's mission. And we really do the homework for you. And so I'm really happy, really proud of that program and happy to be here and talk to you about it. Well, and I love that you shared that with us. Thank you so much, because there are a lot of people that start in the house cleaning business as cleaning business owners and also homeowners that when they first get started, they think all cleaning chemicals do what the labels promised. And I'm curious, is that true? Well, I think there was really a need for a label like this in the marketplace so that you could look beyond claims of saying that a product is green or something like that to really be very specific about what the promises are for that label. So the Safer Choice, I'll show you. We're not talking about a particular brand here. We're talking about a label. So this is a little mock-up bottle. It isn't an actual cleaning product, but you can see the label here. And when you're at the store, you can see it just as just a little label that is either on the front of the product is where we like to see it, or sometimes on the back. And that label means that the product is made with Safer Ingredients for People for the planet and that it's tested to be other. There you go. There's an example of it on a product. I'm supposed to do endorse particular products so I couldn't hold one up, but so I'm sure that a lot of your followers here, people tuning in, have probably have some Safer Choice products or Safer Choice certified products in their homes, in their businesses already. And so maybe you could do a little inventory of what you have already to see what's there. But when these products carry the label, it means that they meet EPA's highest standard for ingredient safety, performance and packaging as well. So we have nearly 2000 products that are currently, certified products that are currently on store shelves that a variety of price points that cover merely all of your household cleaning needs. And you have a variety of brands to choose from. So I can get into a little bit of kind of what the label actually means, but I just wanted to start there to make sure people understand what it looks like, what we're talking about. And really that we see it as a way to differentiate a product in the marketplace. Yes, when I first started, when I first learned about the Safer Choice program, I was really keenly aware that it offered something that I didn't have to do on my own because I was trying to read all the safety data sheets and I was trying to figure out is this safe for me to use inside someone's house? Is it safe on particular surfaces? And then if I find something that is a Safer Choice, is it gonna be as effective? So yeah, please share with us. What does the label mean and how does that all work? Yeah, and one more thing about how, we see it for, it's for consumers to be able to have that product differentiation. It can also be a differentiation for your business for people in the audience who are tuning in who own their own cleaning businesses really being able to tell your customers if you're using Safer Choice products, Safer Choice certified products that you can tell your customers that. And you can share some of what we have in our website or in our media kit to help them know. But getting into a little bit about what the label itself is. So every Safer Choice product relies on or has to include only the chemicals that are on our Safer Chemical Ingredient List. And so unlike most labels out there, we really look at every single chemical in that formulation too. It has to, we have to really know what we know what the chemicals are and we know how they interact with each other. So it's rather than saying something is free of a particular chemical, we're looking at the whole thing. So I think that's what really sets Safer Choice apart. And it's also, it's an EPA owned label. So it takes all of the information that we have here at EPA's Chemical Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention to bring into doing this analysis. And so it really doesn't work so that you don't have to spend a whole lot of time looking at those less and standing in an aisle comparing one product to, I mean, you still have some products to choose from because we have a variety of them with the logo. But it really I think helps with that choice to feel confident. Well, one of the things I really like about the Safer Choice program is that with the label, both the homeowners and the house cleaners that they hire can agree on, this is what you're bringing into my home. Instead of the homeowner saying, how about using this product? And the house cleaner saying, well, there's a different version that I would prefer to use. And so it's kind of a cross the board label that then keeps everybody safe, which I absolutely love because now we can come to some agreements on what it is we're gonna be using. Right, and we also have a fragrance free option. So if there's someone who is particularly sensitive or wants to move forward with that option, then you can kind of bring that to the table as well. So I think that's a good way to offer some potential variety and still be able to have that kind of the underpinning of Safer Choice. Well, and I'm so glad you brought that up about the fragrance free because when I got started in the house cleaning business and this is true for a lot of cleaning companies today, they think that if they leave the house with all kinds of smelling aromas when they leave that the house means that it's clean and spraying chemical on top of chemical on top of chemical. And I won't use any brand names, but spraying them all and then leaving and then like, oh, the house smells so clean. Often triggers a lot of chemical allergies to people. And so knowing that there is a fragrance free version and that there are safer choices, I absolutely love that because that's a great starting point to say, hey, listen this is gonna be less allergy triggering for my clients. Yeah, exactly. And I think that a lot of people do really associate certain smell with being clean. And so we provide a variety of options there so that we can meet different customers where they are, but still with that same framing. Well, and you mentioned that there is a whole entire list of cleaning chemicals that you evaluate against. I think there were 950 on the choice list there. And I'm really intrigued, like how does someone get on that list? Can they just like say, hi, I'm on the list and claim that they are, is there a process they have to go through? And there's a whole process and we review, we review this on a rolling basis. And so I will say that we use this mostly for the safer choice label for cleaning chemicals, but other companies like Apple and Levi's will use that safer chemical ingredient list in there for their manufacturing process to say these are the chemicals that we want to use, whenever they can. And so I think that's important as well, but we reviewed it last time a few months ago where we will add a couple of chemicals to the list working with companies that make those chemicals and it goes through a review process. And we also sometimes take some chemicals off of that list. And so are you familiar with PFAS chemicals? Does that come up in your work? Sometimes, but it's not as common as it could be. And it depends on where in the country or where in the world people are. We get questions all the time about is this available in my area? So in some areas there are chemicals that are more available than in other areas. Well, PFAS is a kind of emerging chemical of concern, I would say, it's a group of chemicals. And so recently we took here at EPA at this favorite choice program, we took some actions with our safer chemical ingredient list to move or we call it putting a gray square on a chemical. So putting a gray square on the chemical saying we're phasing this off of the list. And we've done that with PFAS chemicals and it's actually been a good story because it's something that's been coming up in the news a whole lot, chemical that classic chemicals that they're been concerned with. But we worked with, there was a water-based floor finish that was thought not to work well without PFAS, but we worked with that company, that's a rich choice partner and with reformulating that floor finish. So it no longer included that chemical of concern and we're told that it works just as well, but not better than the original version. And so we're looking on an ongoing basis, not just to static, like these are great chemicals, leave them on the list, but we're really looking at it on an ongoing basis and taking chemicals on and off the list based on what our toxicologists are find. So I've come from a law background, but we have a team of biologists, toxicologists, other professionals here and doing the homework, like I said. I have watched some TikTok videos where people mix all kinds of stuff and they do some really entertaining kinds of things. And it's not really very safe and it makes me really upset that we watch and we pass it around millions of times and go, oh my goodness, look at all this. What advice can we give to maybe the youth that are out there that think it's okay to not, I mean, we're not talking any safer choice at this point, we're just talking, they're just mixing chemicals and they don't know what they're mixing and there could be some really serious messages that need to be shared with them in the terms of this could be hazardous to your health. Right, yeah. I mean, I watched some of those probably same videos and I have a 12 year old stepdaughter who likes to make slime and things like that. And so I'm very cautious and try to make sure that I'm supportive of wanting to experiment with science but doing so in a way that is overseen by a teacher or someone and not, because we want to make sure that not combining leach and ammonia, so we don't want to do anything that can be really or encourage anything but to be very dangerous. So yeah, I share your concern there. But I think with safer choice, we have our toxicologists doing all of this work and really want to make sure that people are staying away from anything potentially dangerous. And I love that you have a team because as small business owners, we do not. And as homeowners, we do not. And so to be mixing chemicals, we do not and should not be doing that. Now that I got that out there, yeah, I feel better already. Ah, I feel better already. Okay, so now I have a question and this comes up a lot in our conversations because I'm really insistent that everybody that goes through our cleaning training programs read safety data sheets and that they learn how chemicals work. And so they ask me about questions like safer choice. How do I know it's as effective as like another product on the market that I saw on an infomercial that supposedly cleans everything with just one swipe? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Now, well, I will say that safer choice certified products are also, they're tested not only for chemical safety aspects but also for effectiveness, that they actually work. And so I think that that should help but as far as making people feel comfortable with it, but I will say that there are a variety of products. So you can try one product, one dishwashing fluid and if you don't like it as much they're having a variety of other options there as well but they do all need an effectiveness standard. I don't know if that'll draw everyone away from what they see on an infomercial but hopefully that would help. I'm not knocking the infomercials. I'm knocking the idea that with one sweep, one chemical with fancy packaging can solve a problem when there are equally as good products that are on the safer choice list. And one of the things I'm so excited about is safer choice is not just cleaning products. Can you tell us a little bit about the variety of products and kind of the scope that it covers? Yeah, the line is focused mostly on cleaning products but we do cover other specialized areas as well including road salt. But one thing that I'm particularly interested in is really exploring. I've been in this position for about a year and a half and really tasked with how can we grow the program? How can we improve how we're communicating about the program, which about the label which is happy to be here and reach different audiences but then where else can we go as far as what other product categories can we cover? And one that I'm interested in is personal care products. And so things like lotions and shampoos and conditioners and deodorants and things like that. And so that's one place where I would really like to see us grow and I'm trying to push for that a little bit. So we'll see how it goes. Well, we don't stop to realize for the most part that we are a participant in all of the chemicals that are in our lives, whether they're cleaning supplies, whether they are body lotions, shampoos, soaps, deodorants, whether it's stuff that we wash our clothes with or the fabrics that we clean our carpets with or any of those things. It's chemical on top of chemical on top of chemical and our bodies are like fighting to try to deal with all of it. And I know that for me personally as a house cleaner being inside people's homes, there are times that I would feel fantastic and I go inside someone's house and I'm like, that house makes me sick. And I would go home and like my eyes would just be bloodshot and my nose is stuffy. And unconsciously, I'm like, I don't wanna go back to that house, that house makes me sick. And there are just things inside the house and it's just chemical sensitivities and what have you that every time I go, they come back just feeling bad and not being able to breathe and like all the sinus stuff in my head. Yeah, I mean, it all adds up everything that we're exposed to. And I think, I would imagine in your position going into so many different houses, you can see the variety of that as well. So yeah, so that's a good choice. We're looking at to see where else that makes sense for us to grow. But right now, and we're very squarely in the cleaning products realm. And so I think that's where you're gonna see our label. Our label. Nice. I also have some up here behind me. There it is up there, all the way up there. Oh, so my question is this, if I'm new to the Safer Choice and I've never bought any Safer Choice products and I was gonna commit to do this today, give it a try, what would that look like for a consumer that's never purchased any Safer Choice products? Where would they go to look? How would they find out about it? So if you're new to this, I would suggest first doing an inventory of what you already have. And so like I said, you might already have a few Safer Choice certified products in your house and your inventory already. I looked up, Angela, I looked up a few doors that you had held up in your previous videos. And you definitely, or you just held that up earlier, you definitely already have some. So I'd say start there, and then look for you can either decide to go all in right away and replace everything that you can with Safer Choice or just as things as you run out of a particular product decide to replace that with a Safer Choice certified product. And so when you're at the store, wherever you shop, looking for the Safer Choice label, and I will say that we've really worked with our partners, some of the manufacturers to expand where we're seeing these products. So working the manufacturers on formulations that can make available at dollar stores, we do see a lot of price competitive products already but working on that even more so that we can really get products into the hands of people who need them, who use them, especially people who are cleaning every day and expose chemicals or really see that as incredibly important and something that we're putting a lot of our energy into. Well, I think having an awareness gives you choices. And I love that you said start where you are and take an inventory of what you have because if you don't know what you have, how do you know what you're using? And now be consciously aware moving forward. It's a little sticker or a little label on the cleaning chemicals that we're buying. And so is this available in the common stores that we have, is this available in grocery stores? Is it limited to certain areas? How wide-reaching is the scope of the EPA's Safer Choice program? I will say it's quite wide-ranging because we do work with those, some of the biggest cleaning brands out there and some of the more smaller niche brands as well. And so at the grocery store, at what the big box stores if you can find our Safer Choice certified products and also at one of the largest online retailers has a, you can do a specific search there as well for Safer Choice certified products. And it will say that we do have, Safer Choices is our main label, but we do have a label specific to disinfectants that are designed for the environment. So that is not something where we're kind of working on the final steps of a rebrand for design for the environment. And that is, should be on the shelves, I think this fall. So right now it's kind of an older logo that looks a little bit like 90s clip art. So we're updating that to make it a little bit more modern, but that's specific to that to me. Well, and aside from the 90s looking logo, one of the things that I love about the design for the environment program with the disinfectants is that we're not talking just about our own physical health, but we're also talking about the world that we live in. And that's really incredibly important when you talk about pollution and you talk about landfills and you talk about the waterways that we have and how that affects the water that we're, our animals live in, animals don't live in water, but our fish life and aquatic life and all those things. And so tell us a little bit about the design for the environment program and what can we do? What's our role in that? So that we can help participate in leaving the world a cleaner place. Cause I love your mission. I'm on the same mission. We're in this together. What can we do? All right. And so with both the Safer Choice and with design for the environment, it really follows the EPA's model of protecting human health and the environment. And so if we think about this a lot of the time with any products, the exposures to humans and to our pets and our children in homes, but then this is also, we're also looking at the ecological exposures as well. So how not only how this affects us, but also how looking at the, we call them the environmental end points. And so looking at the water, air, all of that is also encompassed within this label. So that like I said, you don't have to do the homework. We've already done that part for you. And if you want more information, I should say you can go to the Safer Choice website. And I think you're going to link to it for us as well. Just to get more background on what our Safer Choice standard is and all of that. But at epa.gov slash Safer Choice website. Yes, I'm going to link to all of that below. I also want to link to the book that you wrote, which is about single use plastics. And that's really important to me as well. And we got to have you back on for another one of those conversations about single use plastics. Because as house cleaners, not just the cleaning chemicals inside the bottles, but many of us are using ready to use bottles, which are those that we find at the dollar stores in some of the cheaper places. And every one of those going into a landfill is again polluting our environment. And so if we can use concentrates and we can dilute those concentrates. And I know the Safer Choice program has a lot of concentrates that cleaning business owners and professionals use that homeowners can use as well. And I love the fact that they are readily available to everyone. And I know a lot of the big box stores, like you said, the major online retailers are carrying these products. I do have a question that came in from one of our viewers here today. And she wanted to know if these products are available in England. Is the Safer Choice program primarily just the USA? Or is it Canada as well? Like how white is it? And we do have some availability in the UK in England, but I believe it's probably more limited than it is here in the US. But that's something that we're working on as well. And I will say that I really appreciate you bringing up the plastics part of this. Because I think that's something that we're encouraging and trying to have our Safer Choice partner companies talk with each other about how to address single use plastics. It's something that the United States is entering into negotiations on a global plastics agreement. And so it's something that's really top of mind for a lot of people. But it doesn't mean you have to completely change the way you do things. And you can be effective, maybe even save some money by using those concentrates and watering them down yourselves rather than buying the single use. So really happy that you brought that up and love to talk to you about it again sometime. Well, I'm really excited about the Safer Choice program because it removes a lot of gas work. And like you said, you guys have already done all the testing. Instead of just testing a brand, you're testing all the different ingredients inside that product. And that is huge because we don't have the ability as individuals to do that. And so when somebody like the EPA comes along, I say somebody, some huge conglomeration like the EPA comes along and says, hey, listen, we got your back on this. We got you covered. All you gotta do is find the label. Okay, that makes it so simple and so easy. And to know that they're readily available in all the grocery stores and all of the regular stores where we buy cleaning supplies and chemicals. I love the fact that it's so readily available in the United States. And I say that because I'm in the United States. And so that's my mark. That's where I am. And I know a lot of our friends from across the globe have different choices and it always comes down to you gotta check the area that you live in. I would say that we have Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Spain, UK and Greece are the places that are really covered. But of course, the United States is where we're based and I think you'll see them up. I did not know it was that big. I'm giving you a happy bill for that. Thank you, thank you. That is fantastic. I didn't know it was that wide reaching. That's great. All right, so do we have any other questions here? I know we've got lots of questions that have come in. These are in the sidebar. I promise, Jenny, we'd only keep her here today for 30 minutes. So our time is wrapping up. I'm gonna be back inside the notes and we will answer all of these questions on an ongoing basis. But my hat is off to Jenny today for the time that we spent together. You guys, if you don't know about the Safer Choice Program, now you do. I want you just to open the dialogue here. Start having a conversation about it. Come back to this particular channel wherever you're watching this. Ask your questions, we wanna get them answered. And we want you to start being aware that there are choices that are easily available and readily available to you right now. Thank you so much for letting me come on and talk about Safer Choice. I really appreciate it. We are so excited that you're here and I would love to have you back again and chat with us again. Thank you so much. You guys, this was awesome. And we'll see you again next time here on the same channel. So take care and have a great day. And before you leave, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.