7gen Bloc

It had all the makings of a nightmare:
"Seventh Generation Battles Carcinogenic Chemical Controversy"
""Organic" and "Natural" Consumer Products Found Contaminated with Cancer Causing Chemical!"

Less than two weeks ago, I woke up to headlines bearing the type of story you hope lives only in a bad dream. An experience that you think you've spent your whole business career working to avoid. Yet, viewed another way, it was a rather extreme opportunity to review who we are, how we do things, and how to be a better company for it.

Here's what happened. On March 14, the Organic Consumers Association, a consumer advocacy group, released a report showing that 47 organic and natural consumer products contained detectable levels of the contaminate 1,4-dioxane. Seventh Generation was one of the brands named in the study.

I of course worried that this attack on our honesty would damage our reputation, a reputation that we've spent 20 years building, one day at a time. But rather than fight our way through this complicated controversy, the path forward was in many ways a simple one--tell the truth. As they say in court, tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Don't bend it to make it sound better, or even leave out a detail or two you'd never be expected to share.

With the amazing support of Chrystie Heimert, our communications director, and a team of internal managers, we rushed right into the jaws of the tiger. On Thursday, March 13, the day before the Organic Consumers Association would hold a press conference and accuse us of improperly disclosing the inclusion of a dangerous chemical in our dish liquids, I called Ronnie Cummins, the OCA's executive director, and left a message asking if we could talk. He never returned my call. I had hoped to better understand his goals for organizing the media event and to request the test results in advance of the meeting, to be better prepared to respond to questions.

Late Thursday night, the story broke in the Los Angeles Times. We had our first glimpse of the full details of the issue. Friday, our team showed up at the press event. Of the 29 companies taken to task over the inclusion of 1,4-dioxane in their products, it seemed that we were the only ones to show our faces. There was no shortage of tension in the room. I eagerly awaited the chance to tell our side of the story.

Having waited patiently for half an hour during the presentation, I raised my arm as high as I possibly could to be the first one to participate in the question and answer session. What I said, as well as the comments made by Martin Wolf, our chief scientist, and Chrystie Heimert, can be read on our website. I will reiterate here that we do not intentionally add the compound to our products. As the LA Times noted, "...[1,4-dioxane] is a byproduct of a process used to soften harsh detergents." What's more, the FDA and our own strict guidelines deem our dish liquids safe. Even the OCA report shows that in terms of 1,4-dioxane, our dish liquid is the safest on the market.

That said, we did not argue with the OCA's overall findings. We did not disagree that 1,4-dioxane doesn't belong in our products--the contaminant is unacceptable to who we are and what we stand for. We expressed our support for OCA's work and even encouraged further testing, which we offered to help pay for.

After having spent six years working on this problem--and reducing the compound to minute levels--it was sad that our incomplete progress would be characterized as a dishonest act. We won little solace from the fact that we had the lowest levels of any dish liquid that was tested (almost 50 times lower than another brand) and that no dish-liquid brand had totally eliminated the contaminate. Nor did we get much help from the OCA. I asked Ronnie Cummins point blank: What do you recommend we do? His answer: I don't know.

But the truth is that our incomplete progress was simply not good enough. Not good enough because we had excluded our consumers and key stakeholders from the dialogue about how to completely eliminate 1,4-dioxane. The compound wasn't highlighted on our web site nor detailed in our corporate responsibility report. In this, we had failed.

And therein lies our lesson. We had had hundreds of meetings and conversations about how to crack the 1,4-dioxane problem. We ran many of our own tests, worked closely with raw-materials suppliers and manufacturers, and celebrated our progress in slashing levels of the compound. We just forgot one essential step: sharing our trials and tribulations with everyone who wanted to weigh in, express their concerns, ask their questions, challenge how quickly we were moving--perhaps even to share a potential solution.

That's going to change. We are committed to reformulating our dish liquid as quickly as possible and completely eliminating 1,4-dioxane from all of our products. We will communicate our progress (or lack thereof). And we will continue to urge the Federal Trade Commission to include definitions of "organic" and "natural" in the revised edition of the Green Marketing Guidelines--so when consumer-products companies use those terms, shoppers are assured that we all mean the same thing.