Natrue and QAI Work on Recognition Agreement

Natrue, an interest grouping of international cosmetic manufacturers, who have developed their own ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ standards, are working on a mutual recognition agreement with Quality Assurance International (QAI) in the US, to ensure that products complying with the Natrue or NSF/ANSI 305 ‘made with organic’ standard will be recognised by both bodies. The alliance is to cut costs and save time for manufacturers, according to the Natrue General Secretary.

Natrue was launched last year and 120 products have been certified already. Natrue represent cosmetic companies such as Lavera, Logona, Primavera, Santaverde, Dr Hauschka and Weleda and has formed a ‘strategic alliance’ with the German Cosmetic, Toiletry, Perfumery and Detergent Association – a conventional industry body representing members such as GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson and Colgate Palmolive. Natrue suggest on their website that they are aiming to safeguard the highest possible standards for natural cosmetics and their ingredients and have even criticised the COSMOS standards being developed by a group of EU organic certification bodies. But although the criticisms made are very relevant, the Natrue standards are also very weak in comparison with the official standards of the United States Department for Agriculture (USDA).

It frustrates me that the cosmetics industry keep repeating the statement about the lack of an official definition for the terms ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ because these terms are defined in the USDA standards, which are far more stringent that those of any of the other certification bodies or industry groupings. The proliferation of weak unofficial standards that lack government regulation is proving to be a great source of confusion for consumers.

Following are some examples of deficiencies in the Natrue standards.

• For some products labelled as ‘Natural Cosmetics,’ such as hair care emulsions and gels and cleaning products containing surfactants, the minimum amount of natural substances permitted is 3 percent. This is shocking! The rest can be made up of ‘nearly-natural’ and ‘nature-identical’ substances, which fundamentally means synthetic chemicals with the same or similar molecular structure, but they are still synthetic, produced in a laboratory setting and absolutely not natural, which is highly misleading for consumers. Synthetic versions of natural substances are often manipulated to give them properties deemed useful by the manufacturer, such as increased shelf-life and stability, but this often makes them more difficult for the human body to break down and decreases their biodegradability. Under this Natrue label soaps can contain as little as 1 percent natural ingredients. Surely this is no better than many mainstream offerings!
• For beauty products labelled as ‘Natural’ with some organic ingredients, only 15 percent of the ingredients need to be chemically unmodified. 70 percent of those must be organic, but this is a very small proportion, meaning that manufacturers can use this label when their products contain as little as 10.5 percent organic ingredients.
• Worst of all for the ‘Organic Cosmetics’ label the product only needs to contain a minimum 20 percent natural ingredients and 95 percent of those must be organic. So a product can be labelled as ‘organic,’ when it contains only 19 percent organic ingredients! The rest can ‘nearly natural’ or ‘nature identical,’ or in other words, synthetic.
• Synthetic ingredients permitted include: aluminium hydroxide, C14-22 alcohols, cetearyl alcohol, decyl glucoside, a variety of hydrogenated ingredients (meaning they have been heated to a high temperature aided by metal catalysts such as nickel and palladium), sodium coco-sulphate, sodium lauryl sulphate and numerous others.

In my opinion, this is very misleading for consumers, who rightly expect a product labelled as ‘organic’ to contain a high proportion of organic ingredients, not a minority of organic ingredients amidst a synthetic concoction that is masquerading as ‘nearly natural.’

The NSF Standards

I have not had the chance to survey the recent version of the NSF-International Standard, but at its draft stage the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) in the US were concerned that the standards won’t be federally regulated, unlike the USDA organic standards. The ‘made with organic’ standard allows claims about organic contents for products with a minimum of 70 percent organic content.

NSF International, initially decided to establish standards for personal care products, following the now revoked USDA declaration that personal care products could no longer bear the USDA organic label.

The draft standards were developed and voted on by the NSF Joint Committee on Personal Care, which included organic personal care manufacturers, regulators, organic program administrators, organic product retailers, trade associations such as the Organic Trade Association’s (OTA) Personal Care Organic Standards Task Force (who made a strategic design to collaborate with NSF-International) and other stakeholders in the organic product community.

The OTA is a business association for the organic industry in North America and its task force is charged with exploring and establishing consensus standards for ‘organic’ personal care products. Initially the association was attempting to create their own standards through the OTA’s Task Force, “which was exclusively an industry brainchild,” says Craig Minowa,

“The OCA went there to represent consumers and was barely allowed to even ask questions. The NSF standard is supposed to be a more balanced process of creating standards, but there are things in the labelling programme that are not to the level that we would expect for organic products. It won’t be federally regulated. The OCA’s position is really that we already have an organic standard and there is no need to confuse consumers.”

The draft NSF-International standards do not authorise the inclusion of water as an organic ingredient, but a percentage of the water (up to the amount that was naturally present in the plant prior to dehydration) can be classified as organic content, although “there are restrictions on how you do the calculation” says Bob Durst, “I think we came up with a fairly workable methodology for doing that calculation, which should be acceptable to the hydrosol industry because it is actually being fairly liberal.”

Products labelled as ‘100 per cent organic’ or ‘organic’ must meet USDA-NOP standards and products labelled as ‘made with organic,’ must contain 70 per cent organic ingredients.

Several processes prohibited in the USDA organic standards found their way into the draft version, such as oleochemical cleansing ingredients (e.g. sodium coco sulphate) and processes such as hydrogenation and sulphation.

David Bronner, President of Dr Bronner Soaps indicated that the standard is similar to the Soil Association’s, although it prohibits the use of the petroleum-based surfactant, cocamidopropyl betaine.

Sadly it would seem that it costs $100 dollars to purchase a copy of the adopted ‘made with organic’ standard so I am not in a position to find out if the standards have been strengthened or weakened just yet. However, I am concerned that the recent explosion standards shaped by the industry, without the input of consumer organisations and lacking federal regulation is an attempt to undermine the USDA standards with significantly weaker versions. Baffling consumers is certainly one way of drawing their attention away from more stringent, official standards. Thus I am suspicious of any alliances between certification bodies, particularly those made up of mainstream cosmetic industry members, and my advice is to opt for products bearing the USDA seal.