Over the past year, our Mind the Store campaign and coalition partners at NRDC won commitments from 13 top home improvement, big box, and auto-parts retailers to ban the sale of paint removal products containing the hazardous chemicals methylene chloride and NMP at over 30,000 stores across North America and the world.

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its final rule on methylene chloride in paint strippers. The Trump administration’s final rule will ban consumer uses and sales of these dangerous paint strippers while continuing to allow commercial sales to contractors and other professionals.

On Monday, Ace Hardware Corporation became the 13th U.S. retailer to publicly commit to stop selling and distributing paint removers that contain the toxic chemicals methylene chloride and N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP).

Today the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the news that Menards has become the latest retailer to phase out the sale of paint strippers containing the dangerous chemicals methylene chloride and NMP.

In 2018, we won a wave of commitments from eleven of North America’s largest retailers to ban the sale of paint strippers containing the toxic chemicals methylene chloride and N-methylpyrrolidone (NMP). To see how these retailer policy commitments have been implemented, campaign staff, partner organizations and volunteers are visiting stores across the country to see whether retailers are following through to “mind the store.”

We have spent the past few days with three courageous moms, who have taken the unimaginable grief of losing their sons and turned it into tenacious advocacy. They’re working to get the deadly chemical their sons were all exposed to off store shelves and out of workplaces.

Representative Pallone and Representative Lowey stand up for victims of deadly paint strippers.

The case for Lowe’s and other retailers to stop selling dangerous paint strippers has never been stronger.

Today a group of leading public health organizations, including the Learning Disabilities Association of America and Autism Society, publicly called on Lowe’s to protect kids from toxic paint strippers.