Revision of the EU Ecolabel Criteria for: All-purpose cleaners, sanitary cleaners and window cleaners. Preliminary Report

The EU Ecolabel criteria for all purpose cleaners, sanitary cleaners and window cleaners are under revision. This revision process will take into account the current market conditions and the EU Ecolabel criteria will aim at addressing the most important environmental impacts of the all-purpose cleaners in a life cycle perspective. The identification of the main hotspots is carried out in this study by means of an initial extensive literature review and subsequent LCA studies. LCA studies showed that sourcing of the raw materials is the most relevant environmental aspect followed by heating up the water during cleaning if needed. Based on the normalisation assessment, by far the most significant impact category for all-purpose cleaners in Europe is natural land transformation. These findings are in agreement with the published literature and can be extrapolated to other all-purpose cleaners such as sanitary cleaners and window cleaners. The study reveals that there are several improvement opportunities such as cleaner concentration which can bring savings in resources or reduction in the wash temperature. Changes in the detergent formulation can also reduce the impacts in different categories.