Proprietary Ingredients

There are reasons why certain ingredients are proprietary. It gives the industry/person that discovered the ingredient an edge over their competition. Coca Cola for many years maintained proprietary ingredients in their beverages. So proprietary that a while back when someone tried to sell the formula… well you know the rest.

Proprietary doesn’t necessarily mean bad, all it means is: “my secret ingredient/weapon”. Many medications, herbal remedies cosmetics, and beauty products contain proprietary ingredients. With all these proprietary ingredients floating around, who monitors what they are? Is the industry asking us to trust them? No! Most of the proprietary ingredients are still ingredients and have to meet the approval of the overseeing agency. The FDA maintains a database of all the proprietary compounds used in medications and other food products. The herbal industry… that’s another story.

The NYSDEC maintains a list of all the proprietary ingredients found in hydraulic fracturing fluids. Yes, we have a right to know what they are. So, what the DEC did was release a list of all the compounds found in frac fluids used in NYS. It can be found in the dsGEIS. If you are really curious, you can study the MSDSs of a frac job, then do some chemistry and back pedal the reaction and/or cross reference with the DEC list and to try and figure out which ingredients were used as proprietary. At some point, we have to believe that the DEC or the EPA reviewed the list along with its intended use and decided that for the use given the proprietary chemicals were safe to use. 

Turns out that among the BIG mysterious secret ingredients are surfactants- like the ones used in shampoo, that run down our drains day in and day out.