Environmental and Health Issues: EPA Fines and Community Events
Full Transcript
Chedraui USA Inc., the parent company of El Super and Smart & Final, has been fined four hundred seventy-two thousand three hundred sixty-nine dollars by the Environmental Protection Agency for selling illegal disinfectants.
This penalty stems from violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. The EPA conducted inspections in 2021 at two stores in California and discovered that the company was distributing unregistered disinfectants that made unverified claims about effectiveness against microorganisms.
Following these findings, it was revealed that these products were also widely circulated in stores throughout Nevada and Arizona. Amy Miller, the director of the EPA’s Pacific Southwest region enforcement and compliance assurance division, emphasized that unregistered disinfectants can contain dangerous ingredients.
Chedraui stated that customer safety is their highest priority and acknowledged that during the pandemic, they sourced disinfectants from new vendors to meet unprecedented demand, which led to some mislabeled products.
They confirmed that once notified, they immediately removed these products from sale and are committed to regulatory compliance. The EPA identified specific products including S&C Sanitizer and S&C Disinfectant, which contained quaternary ammonia and were found in an El Super location in Santa Ana, California.
These products were deemed toxic and had a label warning of danger. Another product, Prinex Sanysol, had unverified effectiveness claims and was distributed at least sixty-one times. At a Smart & Final location in Hayward, California, the product labeled Perfect Professional Advanced Multi-Surface Sanitizer was also found to have unverified claims about killing germs and was distributed at least fifty-three times.
The EPA confirmed that these products are no longer sold in any El Super or Smart & Final locations in the Las Vegas Valley, where Chedraui operates four El Super and seven Smart & Final stores. For more information, you can contact Alan Halaly at [email protected].
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