Welcome to the World of Marine Cleaner Greenwashing

Join us on a journey to uncover true eco-friendliness versus marketing tricks. Let the greenwashing games begin.

The short version: non-toxic, OCEAN-DEGRADABLE™ ingredients, coupled with labeling that actually says what a product does, are the only long-term answer for cleaners released straight into the water. That's Simple Sailor Marine's mission, full stop.

In this post, we break down the terms you'll see on marine cleaner labels, and why we chose to do the harder, more expensive thing and go OCEAN-DEGRADABLE™ instead.

The Law on Boat Cleaners — Or Lack Thereof

There's no law stopping anyone from bottling chemicals more toxic than they'd ever admit and selling them as "boat soap" at a steep markup. The most common offender: formulas built around sodium lauryl sulfates, an acute aquatic toxin. In small doses, diluted correctly, the aquatic impact is limited. Scale that up to what a 300-foot yacht actually uses — or a marina full of boats — and the percentage in the water goes from negligible to catastrophic, fast, for seagrasses, algae, and phytoplankton.

A lot of "boat soap" on the market is simply automotive soap, white-labeled and diluted to be gentler on marine paint — not reformulated for direct ocean release. Some formulas add "sheeting" agents for shine, at a real cost to the microorganisms in the water they land in.

The second most common category: two-step teak cleaners built around sodium hydroxide (industrial lye) and hydrochloric acid — genuinely effective at removing teak stains, and genuinely hard on everything around them. Here's the chemistry:

NaOH(aq) + HCl(aq) → NaCl(aq) + H₂O(l)

Sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid neutralize into salt water. Which sounds harmless — and that's exactly the trap. The danger isn't the end reaction; it's what each step does before it neutralizes, and what a rinse-off sends over the side before the two ever meet.

Both chemicals strip the passivation layer off stainless steel — the microscopic oxide layer that keeps stainless from rusting. That's why stainless often comes back stained after a two-step acid treatment. The usual fix — a PTFE-based polish followed by an acid paste — buffs out the surface rust but doesn't restore the passivation layer, which is gone for good. Add in that a meaningful share of Step 1 typically rinses straight down the scuppers before Step 2 ever gets applied, and you've traded a clean deck for a corroding rail and a chemical discharge nobody accounted for.

There's a time and place for strong acid-based teak treatments — used rarely, diluted correctly, with stainless protected beforehand. The instructions usually say so. They're also usually the first thing skipped under a time crunch.

Want to understand stainless passivation in more depth? Wikipedia: Passivation (chemistry)

What's Actually in the Bottle?

We started Simple Sailor Marine in 2019 to take the pain out of teak cleaning without the trade-offs above. We built it backwards from how most of the industry works:

1. We compiled every material found in boat and superyacht construction, and the specific problems each one causes, drawing on our combined 36 years working on deck.
2. We listed every organic and inorganic chemical compatible with each material — regardless of cost — and sourced samples of each.
3. We tested viable chemicals at incremental concentrations, tracking long-term effects on real superyachts and in-house test beds.
4. We had our formulas and reactions independently lab-reviewed.
5. We sampled our growing customer base and didn't move to production until we had full approval.
6. Only then did we start making and selling product.

What we've seen elsewhere in the industry, structurally: identify a high-margin, high-pain-point category. Review publicly available safety data sheets from existing products. Have a lab tweak an existing formula just enough to avoid infringement. Bottle it, market it as the newest eco alternative, and manage the reviews that come in once sailors — who understandably don't read full SDS documentation in the middle of a maintenance day — encounter the gap between the label and real-world use.

A note on "proprietary trade secret" on safety data sheets: be a little skeptical when you see this phrase. In practice, reverse-engineering a cleaning formula's pH and core properties is inexpensive and fast — often achievable for under $100 in testing. We know because we do exactly this kind of analysis in-house, with an organic chemistry background on our team and two independent labs we work with regularly. "Trade secret" protects less than most labels imply; it mostly just makes a product harder for a customer to evaluate.

The Terms You'll See on Labels

Each of these shows up constantly. None of them are automatically false — but none of them are automatically true either, and most labels don't give you enough information to tell the difference:

• BIODEGRADABLE — a genuinely confusing term without more context (see below)
• ECO-FRIENDLY — undefined; a product formulated for fresh water can still be toxic in salt water
• MARPOL COMPLIANT — MARPOL Annex V's actual wording on cleaning agents is a single, broad sentence (see below) — it doesn't specify chemicals or percentages
• CLEAN MARINAS — a real certification program for marina facilities, not a product-label endorsement
• EPA SAFER CHOICE — a legitimate program, but participation involves a fee and an application process, which is worth knowing when you see the logo

If a product is genuinely well-formulated, it usually doesn't need to lean on these terms to make its case. We publish our actual data instead — see below — rather than a logo.

What MARPOL Annex V Actually Says About Cleaning Agents

Here's the full, specific text from IMO Resolution MEPC.219(63), the source most "MARPOL Compliant" labels are implicitly pointing to:

"Cleaning agents and additives contained in deck and external surfaces wash water: (6) These substances must not be harmful to the marine environment."

Read the full resolution here

That's the entirety of the relevant wording. No named chemicals, no percentage thresholds, no test standard specified. It's a real regulation, but "MARPOL Compliant" on a cleaner label is doing a lot more marketing work than the underlying text supports — a wide range of formulas could technically claim it.

Biodegradable vs. Non-Toxic — They're Not the Same Claim

"Biodegradable" appears on nearly every product marketed as green. It's become a shorthand shoppers trust without necessarily knowing what it's certifying.

Here's how we define our own claims, specifically, so there's nothing to interpret:

• Direct-release products (meant to go straight into the marine environment): formulated to be safe for aquatic life when used as directed.
• Non-direct-release products: degrade in 28 days or less, and carry full GHS handling warnings regardless of concentration — even when the underlying chemistry is non-toxic at every tested percentage.

The nuance that gets lost in most "biodegradable" marketing: a product can be fully biodegradable and still take a very long time to actually degrade in a cold marine environment specifically. Many biodegradability certifications are earned under industrial composting conditions — elevated temperature, controlled humidity — conditions nothing like open seawater. A product can be technically accurate and still misleading about what happens when it actually goes over the side.

The Chemical Classes Worth Understanding

Most "marine cleaners" are rebranded general-purpose or automotive cleaners. Here's what's commonly in them, and why it matters in a marine context specifically:

• Acids (including hydrochloric acid) — can rapidly shift the pH of the water they're released into, stressing aquatic life directly.
• Alkylphenol ethoxylates (APEs) — persistent surfactants with known aquatic toxicity.
• Sodium hydroxide (lye/caustic soda) — reactive, pH-disruptive, and hard on soil and biodiversity if it reaches shore.
• Chlorines and bleaches — can form persistent toxic byproducts (like dioxins) that linger in the environment well beyond the cleaning task.
• Phosphates and nitrates — classic drivers of nutrient pollution and algal blooms in enclosed marina water.
• Optical brighteners — persist in water and continue interacting with aquatic organisms long after the cleaning is done.
• Thickeners like PEG/propylene glycol carbomers — some breakdown pathways contribute to microplastic pollution.
• Ammonia and ammonia adjuncts — toxic to aquatic life, and sometimes present below "reportable limits" even on labels claiming to be ammonia-free.

Alternatives exist for most of these — citric acid or oxalic acid in place of hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide (which breaks down to water) in place of chlorine — generally at higher cost, with a real difference in outcome.

Where This Leaves You

Every one of these terms — biodegradable, eco-friendly, MARPOL compliant — can be accurate on a technicality and still tell you very little about what actually happens when the product hits salt water. That gap is the whole reason label literacy matters more than logo-spotting.

We don't carry the certification badges you'll see elsewhere, not because we don't qualify, but because we'd rather you check our actual data than trust a logo — ours or anyone else's. Our safety data sheets are available on request, our formulation approach is documented above, and our OCEAN-DEGRADABLE™ standard is defined, tested, and consistent across every product we make.

We're not interested in a race to discredit anyone else in this category. We'd rather every sailor reading this leave knowing exactly what questions to ask of any bottle on the shelf — ours included.