Beyond a Single Sustainability Claim

This article was contributed by Koh.

This article was written in collaboration with Koh and GECA

What Makes a Cleaning Product a Better Choice?

Walk down the cleaning aisle — or scroll through cleaning products online — and you’ll encounter no shortage of sustainability messages.

A product might highlight its packaging. Another might focus on particular ingredients, biodegradability or a concentrated formulation. Others may carry terms such as ‘natural’, ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’.

Each of these attributes may tell us something useful. But no single attribute necessarily tells us the whole story.

Cleaning products interact with people and the environment at multiple points throughout their lifecycle: through the raw materials and ingredients they contain, how they are manufactured and packaged, how they perform and are used, what enters waterways after use, and what happens to their packaging at end of life.

There are also impacts that can be less visible to the person holding the bottle: the health and safety of workers, labour conditions through the supply chain and the sourcing of particular raw materials.

So, when we ask whether a cleaning product is a better choice, it is worth asking a broader question: better in what way, and across which impacts?

Sustainability is rarely a single-issue question

One of the challenges with assessing sustainability is the potential for burden shifting: improving the performance of a product to reduce one sustainability impact while inadvertently creating or overlooking another sustainability issue or impact.

Reducing or optimising packaging, for example, is valuable. But packaging alone cannot tell us about the ingredients inside it, the impacts those ingredients may have when released into waterways, the conditions under which a product was manufactured or whether it actually performs effectively.

Likewise, focusing only on what a product does not contain can overlook where its remaining ingredients come from, how readily they biodegrade, how much product is needed to achieve the intended result or what happens to the packaging afterwards.

This is why lifecycle thinking matters.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) also encourages businesses to consider lifecycle implications when making environmental claims. Its guidance notes that products and services can generate different environmental impacts during raw material sourcing, manufacture, distribution, use and disposal, and that focusing on one characteristic can potentially create a misleading impression if other relevant lifecycle impacts are ignored.

A lifecycle approach does not mean pretending any product has zero impact. Instead, it means looking more systematically at the impacts that matter for that particular product category.

What does that look like for a cleaning product?

GECA’s Cleaning Products standard provides one example.

As a lifecycle ecolabel standard developed in accordance with ISO 14024 principles, it assesses products against multiple criteria rather than awarding certification based on one environmental feature. Products must meet all applicable requirements of the standard, with conformance independently assessed by a GECA Approved Assurance Provider.

For cleaning products, that means looking across four interconnected areas.

1. Environmental impacts: what happens beyond the bottle?

Some of the most important environmental impacts of cleaning products occur long before or after we actually use them.

The GECA standard therefore considers issues including biodegradability, substances that can harm aquatic environments, sustainably sourced palm oil and palm kernel oil, waste, water, packaging and recyclability.

For example, phosphorus compounds discharged into waterways can contribute to excessive nutrient loads and algal blooms. The standard prohibits intentionally added phosphorus compounds and places a limit on trace amounts.

Surfactants — ingredients that help water surround and remove dirt — are also subject to biodegradability requirements.

The lifecycle lens extends further upstream. Palm oil and palm kernel oil derivatives are common ingredients in cleaning products, but poorly managed production can be associated with deforestation, habitat loss and impacts on local communities. Where these materials are used, the standard includes requirements around sustainable sourcing.

And the product itself is only part of the equation. The standard also includes criteria covering packaging, recycling information and packaging-to-product ratios.

Most of Koh’s environmental decisions get made at the format stage, long before anyone writes a claim.

We started Koh in 2016 because our own cleaning cupboard was full of single-purpose sprays. What we landed on was one formula that works across most surfaces, ready to use straight from the pack with no mixing and no dilution, which happened to solve the environmental problem and the clutter problem at the same time. Fewer products means less packaging, less freight and fewer bottles.

The format carries most of the load. The Universal Cleaner ships as a 2L and 4L bag-in-box that refills our re-usable spray bottle you keep. One 2L pack does the job of four single-use 500ml trigger bottles. The box is made from recyclable cardboard and the bag uses 80 to 90% less plastic than a rigid container holding the equivalent volume. Across our customers that adds up to over 21 million single-use bottles avoided since 2016 on our own tracking.

Where it gets interesting is knowing where to stop the claim. Our spray bottle is kerbside recyclable, but the pump on top is not, because it has a co-polymer body and a steel spring. So we make that case on reuse and longevity, not recyclability. The trigger is factory rated for more than 10,000 pulls which is significantly longer than standard trigger sprayers. This is the difference between a claim we can prove to a customer and a claim that just reads better.

2. Human health: considering the people who make and use the product

A product designed to keep our homes and workplaces clean should also be considered in terms of its potential effects on human health.

GECA’s Cleaning Products standard restricts a range of substances and chemical classes and prohibits ingredients classified as known or suspected endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, mutagens or teratogens.

It also places limits on volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and requirements around the use of fragrances, preservatives, biocides, microorganisms and enzymes in a cleaning product. 

This matters because human health impacts can occur at different stages of a product’s lifecycle — from workers handling ingredients during manufacture to cleaners regularly using products in workplaces and people occupying the spaces in which those products are used.

Looking at human health alongside environmental impacts helps avoid an overly narrow definition of what constitutes a ‘better’ cleaning product.

Ingredient selection is the point where a product brief either gets harder or gets quietly abandoned.

We work fragrance-free across the range. That sounds like a minor decision and it is not. Fragrance is what most cleaning products use to signal clean, so taking it out means the product has to earn that impression on the result alone. Same with our laundry range. No optical brighteners and no dyes, so a clean shirt is clean rather than tinted and perfumed.

What changed with certification is where the restricted substances list sits in the process. GECA prohibits ingredients classified as known or suspected endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, mutagens or teratogens, and restricts a long list of other substances and chemical classes. If you check that after a formula is finished, you find out too late and you pay for the development twice. So it goes to the chemist at the start of the brief, next to cost and performance.

We also test outside GECA where the human health question is more specific than an lifecycle ecolabel standard is designed to answer. The Universal Cleaner holds the Allergy UK Seal of Approval, which required a 72 hour repeat patch test on volunteers with sensitive skin, with no adverse reactions across more than 100 participants. Several of our products are dermatologically tested by Dermatest and rated excellently tolerated, and our household cleaning products are Sensitive Choice (a labelling system owned by National Asthma Council Australia) recommended. Different standards ask different questions. 

3. Social impacts: looking further into the supply chain

Sustainability also has a human dimension that can be difficult to see on a product label.

Who made the product? Were they working in safe conditions? Were workers paid their legal entitlements? Are appropriate processes in place to address human and labour rights risks?

GECA certification includes requirements covering workplace health and safety, minimum employment entitlements and wages, equal opportunity, modern slavery, lawful conduct, and human and labour rights.

This reflects a broader principle behind lifecycle ecolabelling: environmental performance should not be considered in isolation from the people involved in making the product.

A cleaning product cannot meaningfully be considered a better choice simply because of an environmental attribute if serious human or labour impacts elsewhere in its supply chain are ignored.

Most of our formulations are made in Australia. We chose that originally for quality control and turnaround rather than as an ethical position, and it has an obvious side benefit. It is far easier to know how something is made when you can stand in the factory, which we do quarterly.

The overseas sites are where visibility must be built rather than assumed. Most customers walk into a factory to negotiate price. We walk in with audit questions and ask for the tour, because workplace health and safety and worker wellbeing are not things you can establish from a spec sheet or a video call.

Palm is the other one worth naming. GECA requires RSPO certification to cover at least 20% of the palm oil and palm oil derivatives used in the product, alongside a commitment to increase the percentage of RSPO certified material by 10% each year. We went for 100% from the first formulation and have held it. Setting the bar at the minimum and working up felt like the wrong way round, given we were formulating from scratch anyway.

We also file a modern slavery statement every year without being required to. Koh sits under the threshold that makes it currently mandatory but we feel it’s important for the team at Koh to know that as much as our customers.

The part of the GECA Cleaning Products standard that surprises many is how much of it goes beyond chemistry — from workplace health and safety and employment entitlements through to packaging, recyclability and product performance. You do not pass on formulation alone, which is the right design for a standard that claims to look at a whole lifecycle.

4. Performance: because the product still has to work

There is another important part of the sustainability conversation that can sometimes be overlooked: performance.

A cleaning product ultimately exists to clean. If it does not perform its intended function effectively, environmental improvements elsewhere may be undermined — particularly if consumers need to use more product, repeat the cleaning process or replace it with something else.

For this reason, GECA certification is not simply an assessment of environmental and social attributes. Certified cleaning products must also demonstrate that they are fit for purpose.

It is an important reminder that a better product needs to balance sustainability considerations with the reason the product exists in the first place.

Performance is the entry ticket, not the reward.

If a product does not work, people go back to whatever they used before, and every environmental gain goes back with them.  If a cleaner requires significantly more product, effort or repeated cleaning to achieve the intended result, environmental gains elsewhere can quickly be undermined. So we treat cleaning performance as a gate rather than something to be traded off against a sustainability target. We refer to it as “clean without the compromise” which is a mindset we take with every new product we develop. 

The Universal Cleaner was developed with UNSW, which is not the normal route for a cleaning brand and is the reason one formula works on floors, benchtops, glass, stainless steel, laminates, the oven, bathroom and works as a deodoriser and stain remover. Canstar Blue has awarded the Universal Cleaner winner in 2022, 2023, 2025 and 2026, judged on overall customer satisfaction rather than on an environmental attribute.

Putting lifecycle thinking into practice: Koh

Certification was in our early years something we applied for once a product had been formulated. It now sits inside the development brief alongside cost, format and performance, and it is a hard gate in our new product process. A formulation that cannot meet the standard does not make it to the tooling conversation.
A lifecycle ecolabel standard makes the unglamorous parts legible. It forces you to look at packaging to product ratios, palm oil sourcing, biodegradability and labour conditions in one sitting, rather than whichever one the marketing calendar happens to be asking about. Some of that we were already doing. Some of it we were doing without evidence we could hand to anybody.

Certification is a double edged sword – yes it’s harder, yes it costs time and money but conversely it provides a clear framework that protects the brand and our customers from standards and quality slippage. Commercial considerations are always a necessity in business but without standards and certifications like GECA we wouldn’t have those protections when it came to discussions around margins and profitability etc. It also forces creativity and innovation in ways that wouldn’t be apparent without those standards in place.

From one good attribute to the bigger picture

None of this means that individual sustainability attributes are unimportant.

Reducing packaging matters. Responsible ingredient selection matters.

Recycled content, biodegradability, lower waste and more efficient formulations can all matter.

The challenge is recognising that one positive attribute is one part of a much bigger picture.

That distinction is increasingly important as consumers and businesses try to navigate a crowded marketplace of environmental claims. The ACCC recommends that environmental claims be specific, truthful and supported by evidence, noting that independent and scientific evidence is particularly credible. It also advises businesses choosing third-party certification to look for schemes that are independent, transparent, reputable and robust.

A credible lifecycle ecolabel offers a different proposition from a single environmental claim. Rather than telling us one thing about a product, it asks whether that product meets a suite of requirements designed around the significant impacts of its category.

For cleaning products, that means considering what goes into the formulation and where ingredients come from; impacts on waterways and ecosystems; packaging and waste; the health of users and workers; human and labour rights; and whether the product actually does its job.

There may never be one simple answer to what makes a product ‘sustainable’.

But asking better, broader questions can help all of us make better choices.