Shelf Life Misclassification, Sustainability Exclusion & No Resolution Visibility – Certified Brand Seeking Real Brand Integration Support

Hello PLS Team,

Thank you for hosting this important session. I’m Daniel J. Williams of Ultra Badass Eco Lubricants a USDA Certified Biobased manufacturer of UBELUBE, a nano-enhanced firearm and industrial lubricant formulated for long shelf life, high thermal performance, and environmental sustainability.

Unfortunately, despite meeting or exceeding HAQM’s stated goals for product sustainability, packaging efficiency, and lifecycle support, our integration journey has been defined by internal system failures, misclassification, lack of transparency, and no meaningful resolution visibility.

Key Issues We’ve Faced:

Shelf-Life Misclassification Without Technical Understanding:

Our product was lumped into a short shelf-life category, even after submitting accelerated aging data, chemical formulation specs, and USDA BioPreferred certification. No one seemed to understand that our product is engineered to exceed conventional standards. This caused conflict between internal teams and left us unable to ship FBA until last week — after nearly 10 months.

No Follow-Up After Documentation Submission:

We’ve submitted extensive documentation multiple times, and instead of receiving a response that says, “Here’s what we reviewed, here’s what was resolved, here’s how to avoid it going forward,” we get silence. No acknowledgment. No clarity. No closure. We’re left guessing — is this being handled? Was it denied? Do we need to do it again?

“Guilty Until Proven Innocent” Process With No Notice:

Many of the restrictions and content removals happened without any notification or chance to clarify. It’s a “you’re in violation” first, with no context, and only after pressure can we sometimes find out what the issue even was. There’s no fairness, no warning, and no opportunity to clarify like: “Hey, can you confirm the following before we block your listing?”

Blocked from Sustainability Recognition:

Our USDA Certified Biobased product is excluded from Climate Pledge Friendly because USDA BioPreferred isn’t on HAQM’s accepted list

Our compact Boston round bottle is excluded from Compact by Design due to packaging category rules

CPF is only accessible through third-party certifiers that charge $2,500–$10,000 per SKU, which penalizes minority-owned small businesses like ours who’ve already been through federal testing and compliance

No On-Ramp for Product Lifecycle Integration:

We’ve done the work:

✅ Sustainable design

✅ Verified shelf life

✅ Manufacturing and lot coding

✅ Third-party lab data

✅ Participation in HAQM Accelerator

✅ Packaging efficiency

Yet there is no visible path to get into HAQM’s product lifecycle programs, and no clear point of contact to help.

Our Question:

What role can the Product Lifecycle Support (PLS) team play in helping compliant, sustainable, U.S.-certified brands integrate properly with HAQM’s lifecycle support ecosystem — and prevent these situations from happening again?

We don’t just want a reply — we want a process that includes:

Acknowledgment of what was submitted

Clear explanation of what was reviewed and decided

Closure: what was resolved, what wasn’t, and how to prevent it going forward

A path to be included in Climate Pledge Friendly and Compact by Design programs based on real science and packaging intent, not arbitrary exclusions

If PLS is about empowering brands and reducing product issues, then it starts here — with transparency, fair escalation, and the ability to correct misclassifications before they damage businesses.