To earn a silver or gold medal in Eco-Friendly Purchasing, a city must have a policy that meets CityHealth’s criteria in one of these categories: Foodware, Cleaners and Disinfectants, or Furnishings. Products in each category must meet specific certification standards, listed below with descriptions, logos, and links to product databases.
Produced in partnership with the Center for Environmental Health.
Foodware Compostability Certifications:
BPI certification identifies fully compostable products that do not contain harmful and environmentally persistent PFAS chemicals.
CMA is an acceptance standard for compostables by performing field disintegration testing through several prominent processing methods to ensure products sent to industrial compost facilities adequately break down within the production cycle.
Cleaners Certifications:
Green Seal standards make sure products are safe for people and the environment throughout their entire lifecycle. Green Seal-certified products meet requirements for safer chemicals, responsible sourcing, manufacturing sustainability, sustainable packaging, and product integrity.
UL ECOLOGO® Certified products and services are verified for reduced environmental and health impact. ECOLOGO Certifications are voluntary, multi-attribute, life cycle-based environmental certifications that indicate a product has undergone rigorous scientific testing and exhaustive auditing to prove its compliance with stringent, third-party environmental standards.
This standard reviews each chemical within a product to determine safety for human and environmental health as well as reviewing other components of the product such as product performance, packaging, pH, and VOC’s.
Disinfectants Certifications:
Unlike cleaning chemicals, surface disinfectants that contain safer chemicals are rarely certified as “green” by a third-party organization. Currently, only a handful of safer surface disinfectants are certified by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (U.S. EPA’s) Design for Environment (DfE) Program. Because of this lack of resources, CityHealth created this guide to help cities identify and purchase safer options.
Furnishings (Furniture, Flooring, Carpeting):
Standard (must meet “Targeted Chemical Elimination” criterion 7.4.4)
This certification ensures that products that meet them do not contain toxic chemicals commonly found in furniture like flame retardants and PVC.
This certification ensures that products that meet them do not contain toxic chemicals commonly found in furniture like flame retardants and PVC.
GreenScreen Certified® Furniture & Fabrics are PFAS-free, use safer chemistry and meet the specifications of Kaiser Permanente — a leader in setting standards for environmentally preferable purchasing in the U.S. health care sector.
The Greenhealth Approved seal signals to purchasers that a product has been reviewed for environmental features and found to meet our criteria. The criteria include a variety of components such as chemicals of concern, packaging, and additional attributes.
In 2018, San Francisco adopted a comprehensive carpet regulation that is among the strictest in the nation. It applies to purchases made by or on behalf of City departments. It has minimum recycled content requirements and prohibitions on a long list of hazardous chemicals, including persistent, highly fluorinated compounds.
The Greenhealth Approved seal signals to purchasers that a product has been reviewed for environmental features and found to meet our criteria. The criteria includes a variety of components such as chemicals of concern, packaging, and additional attributes.
