C&E environmental legislation

Another C&E article to write about, though I think I'm getting to this one fast enough that you can see it for a while without paying. Link is here -
There are a couple of things I want to say about this article, both from an environmental standpoint.
1-business to business labeling standards. Absolutely. You can't make a better product without really being able to figure out what's going on with your suppliers. Crucial. I can't believe this hasn't been done before. I use a bunch of chemicals in my daily lab work that I have no idea how they were made-"proprietary information" or what the impact of this synthesis on the environment is. My job currently is to tell you if there is any heavy metals in a particular batch of products-I can do that, for sure. But that doesn't tell you anything about how much waste was produced while these products were being made, how much water was contaminated even if the final product isn't, etc, etc. So we need to get on that.
I very much disagree that labels for consumers are already sufficient, and that there's any kind of good system in place for telling how environmentally friendly a product actually is. I can see claims that companies make, but this is much like I always found it less effort to write a B+ paper for my humanities courses in college than get a B+ grade on a test-when you're the one setting the discussion, you can write to your strong suits. That certainly has influenced what I write about on this blog-I'm going to write what I know, no doubt about it. You may know more than me about something else-that's great, but that's for your blog, not mine. The same thing can be easily shown in food labeling. Yeah, a cereal can make healthy claims that it is "made with whole grains" and be 100% correct. But that doesn't mention the 30 grams of sugar per serving(I'm making these numbers up, but the point is, you write to your strengths). And that works. That's done with household products as well "made from plant derived surfactants" great, but do you do anything about the amount of water/energy used, worry about how those plants are grown, etc? Nobody knows, because the dialogue is entirely set by the company doing the advertising, for their interests.
Which gets to my other beef with the article, and to an extent with a lot of articles that I see coming from the ACS-I don't know if it's official policy or not. Clearly I don't speak for and am not a representative of the ACS, and everyone reading this should remember that.
They advocate for voluntary standards. Nobody would be forced to even report or test anything they don't want to. This is a general position that I see them taking a lot-everything should be driven by what the industrial companies want. Now, they're an industry group-the position that the industry should regulate themselves only voluntarily makes sense within that context. However, I distrust voluntary regulation. I would like to believe that companies will hold themselves to high enough standards that will keep people safe from possible accidents from them, or possible bad effects of their products. But this is expensive. And business is about the bottom line. Therefore someone without this conflict of interest needs to be doing the regulating. I know it costs more to be held to a higher standard than you'd like to. And truthfully I'm looking to be proven wrong her-I'd love to work for a company that voluntarily holds itself to protect other people from itself. But as long as not every company does that, there need to be externally enforced protections.
Overall I do think increased information on the production processes for things we use everyday is important. You can ignore information you don't need, but can't use information that you don't have access to.
what do you all think?