Tell Congress – Protect military families from toxic chemicals in cleaning products!
As the Fiscal Year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) moves to the Senate floor, the House version of the bill already directs the Department of Defense (DoD) to purchase cleaning products that are free from hazardous chemicals like PFAS and instead use safer chemical ingredients.
The Senate should do the same in its bill.
Purchasing products that use safer chemicals would help protect service members, their families, and civilian employees at the more than 2.3 billion square feet of building space managed by the Department of Defense. The military’s billion dollar purchasing power would also help to jumpstart the market for safer products.
EPA’s Safer Choice labels give consumers assurance that a product avoids many known hazardous chemicals and has been vetted by the government. Cleaning products that are certified as Safer Choice do not use fluorinated substances like PFAS and other toxic chemicals that could cause cancer or reproductive and developmental effects. Safer Choice also provides an incentive for major brands and retailers to reformulate their products with safer alternatives.
EPA’s Safer Choice program has proven successful in helping purchasers, retailers, product formulators, and ingredient manufacturers to move toward safer solutions. In applying for certification, companies submit their product’s full ingredient list to Safer Choice for vetting. Nothing can violate the Safer Choice standard, including the “inert” ingredients or fragrance components. EPA also helps companies identify safer alternatives to problematic ingredients.
More than 98% of the 1,700+ Safer Choice certified products are made or sold by U.S.-based companies.
In recent years, Congress has made protecting service members from toxic chemicals a priority in the NDAA and other legislation, including a ban on the use of PFAS in food packaging for military meals, a prohibition on the use of fluorinated aqueous film-forming foam in the 2020 NDAA, and restrictions on the purchase of firefighting gear that contains PFAS in the 2023 NDAA.
To protect the health of service members, their families, and civilian workers, Congress should continue building on this record by directing DoD to use Safer Choice cleaning products in the final fiscal year 2025 NDAA.
Tell your senators: Protect the military and their families from toxic chemicals!