Wipes, devices and other edge cases
Updated
Four formats where the line sits somewhere other than you would guess.
Wipes
A wipe is a delivery format, and the regime follows the claim exactly as it does for a liquid.
A cleaning wipe that removes dirt is a cleaning product. A disinfecting wipe is a registered pesticide, and the registration covers the wipe as sold, including the substrate.
The substrate is not incidental: it holds and releases the liquid, and the efficacy data was generated with that combination. Changing the cloth changes the product.
Contact time is also harder to deliver in a wipe, because a wiped surface dries faster than a sprayed one, and that is a real gap between what a label says and what a user does.
Devices
Something that controls microorganisms by physical or mechanical means rather than chemically, a UV lamp, a steam cleaner, an ozone generator.
Devices sit in a different position from chemical pesticides: they are not registered in the same way, and they are still subject to EPA requirements including labeling and the prohibition on false claims.
Which is a trap for anybody assuming a device is unregulated because it needs no registration number. The claims are still claims.
Air and fabric products
An air freshener that masks odor is a consumer product.
One claiming to eliminate airborne bacteria or viruses is making an antimicrobial claim in the hardest category to support, because efficacy in air is far harder to demonstrate than on a hard surface.
The same applies to fabric and soft-surface claims, which have their own data requirements distinct from hard surfaces.
Impregnated and coated goods
A cloth, a brush or a container treated with an antimicrobial to protect itself falls under the treated articles exemption, provided the claims stay limited to protecting the article.
A cloth sold as protecting the user, or as keeping a surface germ-free, has left the exemption.
It is the same boundary as the preservative page and it catches the same reasoning: the treatment protects the thing it is in, and saying more than that is a claim.