Why Seek Third-party Green Product Certification?

By Rob Freeman | August 8, 2014

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According to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), green building will be a $150 billion market this year in the U.S. alone and is forecasted to grow at 20 percent annually.

According to environmental advocacy organization Architecture 2030, by 2035 approximately 75 percent of the current 375 billion square feet of U.S. building stock will be renovated, and more than 50 percent of this is projected to be green.

 

Array of energy logos

Some certifications, such as ENERGY STAR® and FSC, certify specific attributes. Others, such as Green Seal Certified® and Cradle-to-Cradle, verify a product’s overall environmental impact.

Green building also is a highly competitive market. It is estimated that the marketing dollars spent within the green building industry—from the promotion of design and construction services to building products to education—is $15 to $20 billion per year.

That’s a lot of green marketing. Because “green” can have more than one meaning, manufacturers of sustainable products face a lot of confusion.

Indeed, it is almost impossible for consumers to define what terms like “good for the environment,” “eco-friendly,” or “green,” mean because the terms are almost meaningless by themselves. A manufactured product may have a single sustainable attribute, but does that make the product green?

For instance, two pieces of wooden furniture can be physically indistinguishable from one another, but one may be a Chinese import composed of a carcinogenic type of recycled particle board and the other may be designed and built domestically from solid local wood. How can a specifier decide whether a cabinet made of rapidly renewable bamboo that is sourced from across the globe is more or less sustainable than a solid-wood cabinet made from sustainably harvested local timber?

It’s these quandaries and hidden considerations in building products that make third-party validation and certification so important. More and more manufacturers are relying on established labels to help them promote their eco-friendly products in the marketplace

So, the why of green building product certification is to reduce confusion, while creating goodwill. Unfortunately, the process behind the pristinely packaged, eco-labeled and marketed products we buy can be a little ugly.

Validation, Certification and Standards Bodies Defined

In the world of eco-labels, product claim validation, certification, and standards are related, but not the same.

Validation confirms a product’s claim.

Certification is a more rigorous form of validation that relies on standards.

A standard is a set of guidelines against which a certification is measured. Standards bodies set standards for what can become industry norms. Two of the most well-known and accepted standards bodies are the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Standards Organization (ISO), both of which have created standards for different types of labels that can be used in product claims.

Green-product certifying organizations root their certification programs in both ANSI and ISO guidelines, developing their standards in an open, impartial, nongovernmental, and consensus-based process.

Some certification programs, such as UL Environment, offer validation and certification services for environmental product claims. Other organizations, such as Green Seal™, only offer certification.

Approved Types of Eco-labels

When you are evaluating environmental labels, it can be helpful (and time-saving) to look for labels approved or audited according to accepted environmental standards, such as ISO 14000.

  • Type I—Indicates that a product has undergone rigorous third-party testing and is approved for claims of multiple attributes. ECOLOGO® is an example of a Type I label.
  • Type II—A verification of a single claim or attribute, on a single feature such as energy consumption, sustainable harvesting, recycled  content, or emissions. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an example of a single-attribute certifying body. These can be self-declared.
  • Type III—The equivalent of an environmental product declaration (EPD) and the most stringent type of certification. A Type III label provides consumers with detailed comparative information within a common framework and an examination of a product’s environmental impact, including a life cycle analysis (LCA).

EPDs, LCAs, and LEED v4

Leed certification

Figure 1:
The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) v4 takes green product certification and verification to the next level.

While Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) 2009 will remain relevant and active for years, LEED v4 is more stringent in awarding points for green building materials (see Figure 1). LEED v4 strives for greater transparency–not only of the designers of green buildings, but also of its materials’ content and its occupants’ actions.

LEED v4 relies on product category rules, LCAs and EPDs in its certification process. Indeed, in the reworked Materials & Resources and Environmental Quality categories, certain credits require answering specific product-related questions:

  • LEED MRc3: Where did it come from?
  • LEED MRc2: How was it made?
  • LEED MRc4: What’s inside?
  • LEED EQc2: What is emitted?

The steps in the EPD process are numerous (see Figure 2).

EPD Process diagram

Figure 2:
What comes out of the process is an environmental product declaration (EPD), based on a third-party examination of a product’s environmental impact. Image courtesy of LEED v4 BD+C Reference Guide.

An LCA is an assessment of all the environmental impacts associated with every stage of a product’s manufacture and use, from cradle to grave (i.e. from materials purchased in its manufacture until it is sent to a landfill) or cradle to rebirth (i.e. from materials purchased in its manufacture until the product is disassembled and reused or recycled to create new products).

EPD and LCA are two important acronyms because they are part of the product certification and, therefore, validation process. To complete an EPD, you must complete an LCA.

While it might seem that EPDs and LCAs makes certification more complex, over time they should have the opposite effect–standardizing green building product identification and validation and making environmental claims easier to process.

Product Category Rules

LEED v4 organizes LCA information and requirements according to specific product types using product category rules, which are a step in the EPD process. Product category rules aim to further minimize confusion by using a common process by which products can be evaluated across all the stakeholders involved in a product’s development (such as suppliers, manufacturers, trade associations, purchasers, users, LCA practitioners, LEED consultants, and specifiers).

Wait … Why Are We Doing All This Again?

Manufacturers might find it easy to refer to an acronym that sums up why they’re considering doing all this work in the first place: “PLEase choose my product!” (see Figure 3).

  • Product category rules
  • Life-cycle analysis
  • Environmental product declaration
Product Category Rules Diagram

Figure 3:
PCRs, LCAs and EPDs may be effort- and time-consuming to pursue, but they help clarify purchasing decisions for consumers and help manufacturers get credit for their environmental efforts.

While EPD certification requires more rigorous scientific testing and comprehensive auditing than validation does, the old saying “nothing is worth more than its actual cost” applies.

Avoiding Greenwashing, Reducing Confusion – Back to the Why of Green Product Certification

Hotel card be green

Figure 4:
How many of you have found one of these cards in your hotel room, or received one of those “Go Green—Go Paperless” letters from your bank? Do you really think those companies are doing this for environmental reasons?

Greenwashing is the practice of deceptively marketing a company’s products or policies as environmentally friendly even though there are no discernible improvements. Environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined this term way back in 1986 when he found one of those “Be Green” cards admonishing him to hang up and reuse the towels in his hotel room even though the hotel had no other green initiatives such as recycling. Those cards are still everywhere, even in legitimately green hotels, and it contributes to a big perception problem in defining what “green” means (see Figure 4).

It wasn’t until 1992 that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its first “FTC Green Guides that offers guidelines on environmental claims. The guidelines boil down to: 1) Don’t exaggerate or lie about environmental claims, and 2) Back up claims you make with proof.

An example of a claim exaggeration would be receiving a statement from your bank that reads, “Go Paperless to Save the Environment.” An example of a lie would be claiming that a product is biodegradable when it isn’t, or that it can achieve a specific level of environmental performance when it cannot.

Case Example: FTC vs. EcoBaby Organic Mattress

According to the FTC, EcoBaby Organics Inc. is a blatant case of greenwashing. The FTC has pursued the company for its claims that its baby mattresses are formaldehyde- and volatile organic compound (VOC)-free, although it cannot substantiate those claims. The mattresses are marketed online through sites like EcoFriendOnline.com and thenaturalsleepstore.com. In addition, it is sold on well-known sites like Amazon.com although the references to being VOC- and formaldehyde-free are absent.

In its marketing, EcoBaby Organics prominently displayed the seal of the National Association of Organic Mattress Industry (NAOMI), which it claims raises the standards of mattresses labeled as ‘Organic’ to a higher level of purity than OEKO-certified organic mattresses at present.

The FTC alleges that not only do EcoBaby Organics mattresses not live up to their “no formaldehyde” and “no VOC” claims when subjected to testing, but also that NAOMI is actually owned by, or is an alter-ego of, EcoBaby Organics.

Sustainable manufacturers can avoid greenwashing by following the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) guidelines and remembering that by pursuing EPDs and LCAs, they can help reduce confusion in the marketplace.

To read more, visit: http://www.poplarnetwork.com/news/start-why-green-product-certification#sthash.unV2oa0M.dpuf

 

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