A new greener than green dishwashing liquid’s hit the green market. No, the cleaner doesn’t contain phosphorus — or bleach or phthalates or petrochemicals. Most impressively, this dishwashing liquid also avoids 1,4-dioxane — a cancer-causing chemical that even well-respected green cleaning product companies have said can’t be eliminated without without compromising product quality.

Well, this new 1,4-dioxane-free dishwashing liquid hasn’t compromised quality. It cleans quite well, in fact. And the liquid’s made not by a super-green enviro company, but by Clorox.

How is it that a multinational company known for fighting consumer health protections — a company that self-described green companies define themselves against — has now started leading the industry on the 1,4-dioxane issue? Clorox, it seems, saw a green market that the eco-companies created — and decided it wanted a chunk of it. So in January 2008, Clorox launched Green Works, an eco-friendly line of cleaning products, complete with a Sierra Club endorsement to back its green claims. This unexpected turn of events had many environmentalists squabbling at each other, even leading to the suspension of Sierra Club’s Florida chapter.

Yet while controversies about Sierra Club’s alliance with Clorox remain, Clorox’s Green Works line is actually pushing the green cleaning product industry forward. And serendipitously for Clorox, its initiatives are happening at a time when environmentalists are beginning to question the eco-claims of more established green companies like Method and Seventh Generation.

In March 2008, Organic Consumers Association, a consumer advocacy group, released a study showing that many so-called green products contained 1,4-dioxane — a carcinogen that isn’t even named on ingredient lists because it’s created as a biproduct in the manufacturing process. Dishwashing liquids fared the worst in OCA’s tests; every single dish liquid tested* — from Whole Foods’ 365 brand to Seventh Generation to Ecover — contained 1,4-dioxane. As the LA Times pointed out at the time, “Dishwashing liquids are particularly hard to keep free of 1,4-dioxane because they require surfactants that are powerful grease cutters.”

In light of this news, many so-called green companies rushed to the defensive. Reactions ranged widely. Method defended itself by saying it never called its products “natural” to begin with, while Seventh Generation said that the amount of 1,4-dioxane used in its products is “deemed safe according to the FDA’s and our own strict guidelines” — despite the fact that Seventh Generation found its market by going farther than the FDA’s more lax guidelines. Both Method and Seventh Generation — as well as Ecover and many other self-defined green companies — seemed to agree on this: A dishwashing liquid that’s free of 1,4-dioxane won’t work as well.

Yet in my home test, Green Works dishwashing liquid worked just as well as the Seventh Generation and Shaklee products I’ve used previously. According to Green Works scientist Sumi Cate, Clorox achieved this feat by starting from scratch. “We had a different approach to our formulation, I think, than other products do,” Sumi said. Instead of taking a regular product and trying to substitute out some ingredients, Clorox “took a very blank slate approach and built these ingredients from the ground up.”

Rebecca Sutton, staff scientist for the Environmental Working Group, said she was impressed that Clorox had put a 1,4-dioxane-free product on the market: “Ethoxylation [which produces 1,4-dioxane] is a chemical process that’s of great concern,” she said. “I’m very pleased Clorox is offering this product. This is a significant step.”

The average consumer, however, would be hard pressed to figure out Green Works’ eco-creds. While Green Works’ products — unlike most of Clorox’s products — have printed ingredient lists on the bottles, the items on these lists are very vague. For example, Rebecca was dissatisfied with the items simply called “alkyl polyglucoside” and “biodegradable preservative,” as well as the “fragrance” and “colorants” contained in the four scented versions of the liquid (a fifth version, “Free & Clear,” contains no fragrance or colorants).

Surprisingly, the details Rebecca sought aren’t company secrets; Clorox simply doesn’t make the details easily available for the public. In a conference call with Clorox, Rebecca was able to get much more specific information about these ingredients and said that she was impressed with the safety of Green Works’ ingredients overall. “I thought [Clorox] would immediately give us some confidential business statement,” Rebecca said, “but I was pleasantly surprised by how open they were.”

Sumi said the ingredient lists are kept vague partly to avoid costly changes in packaging if ingredients get swapped out in the future, and partly to avoid overwhelming the average customer. Rebecca noted, however, that the more detailed information could be made available on Clorox’s website — and that information would especially be valuable for people with specific allergies to certain chemicals and fragrances. “It’s really a shame that they don’t provide that information to everybody,” Rebecca said.

Consumer-level transparency issues aside, is Clorox’s dishwashing liquid the greenest out there? Rebecca said comparisons are difficult to make due to the lack of transparency in the cleaning product industry as a whole. She also pointed out that Clorox’s history as a multinational company raised “broader concerns than the health and safety of a specific product.”

Still, from the product-level, Clorox now provides one of the very few options environmentalists have for 1,4-dioxane-free dishwashing. If nothing else, Clorox’s Green Works creates a sort of paradoxical challenge for the green companies — to catch up to a company they’ve disparaged.

Eco-companies face a major competitive challenge too. Clorox’s Green Works dishwashing liquid is available at major supermarket shelves everywhere — for just $3.59 per 22 fl. oz bottle.

* The one exception here is Dr. Bronner’s castile soap, which isn’t specifically marked as dish soap, but is used as such by some people. One other 1,4-dioxane free alternative not on the OCA’s list is LifeTree Home Soap, another all-purpose soap reviewed by Katharine Wroth in Grist.

[crossposted on BlogHer]

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