Conservation Voters for Idaho has joined the Mind the Store campaign in a national “week of action”…
…to urge the nation’s second largest grocery chain, Albertsons, and its subsidiaries like Safeway to stop selling products containing or packaged with toxic chemicals such as lead, formaldehyde, parabens, and BPA. The campaign is calling on the supermarket giant to announce a safer chemicals policy to reduce and eliminate toxic chemicals, as Walmart, Target and other retailers have done.
The week of action is supported by new research revealing toxic chemicals in two dozen products sold by Albertsons, including lead in the handles of summer barbeque basting and cleaning brushes, formaldehyde releasers, parabens, fragrance and other toxic chemicals in personal care and cleaning products.
Albertsons is headquartered in Boise.
Last fall, in a report card rating retailer actions to eliminate toxic chemicals, Albertsons received the third lowest grade of eleven retailers evaluated, with a letter grade of F and only 12.5 out of 130 possible points. Albertsons has no public safer chemicals policy in place. While the company has reported some progress in reducing the use of BPA in canned foods, it has not disclosed a timeframe or plan for completely eliminating and safely substituting BPA in canned foods.
The Mind the Store campaign has already collected more than 130,000 signatures from consumers calling on Albertsons to remove BPA from its canned food and develop a comprehensive chemicals policy. In May, the group co-released a new report that found toxic BPA in nearly 40 percent of food cans tested from the nation’s largest grocery stores and dollar store chains. The campaign found that Albertsons continues to sell food cans lined with toxic BPA. Thirty-six percent of Albertsons’ “private-label” food cans tested positive for this harmful chemical. While that demonstrates notable progress since last year, more work is still clearly needed.