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August 4, 2008

Ecolabeling – Bridging The Gap

Pete Girard
Senior Analyst, Environmental Stewardship
The Timberland Co.

There’s no question that ecolabeling is in demand as companies in all sectors launch marketing focused on “green” company and product attributes.  At Timberland, we’re certainly part of this trend with both product and company focused labeling initiatives. There is also an accompanying growth in media questioning both the effectiveness and the goal of ecolabeling programs and I believe there are some valuable questions being raised.

Many programs go down the road of simply slapping a green moniker on product with very little explanation. This isn’t in itself a bad thing as the ability of consumers to process the details going into these claims is relatively low. I say this not as a slight to consumers but as someone who is routinely stumped in trying to analyze conflicting or unavailable environmental data.

If brands and manufacturers themselves often have less than perfect visibility into their supply chains then it’s no surprise that consumers will have difficulty establishing a relative basis on which to judge green claims. Acknowledging the degree of difficulty we have in understanding our own supply chains may be a step towards sharing the process of greening our business with consumers rather than pushing it at them.

While simple labels are more easily understood they often leave out material parts of a product’s environmental performance. The trouble with simple labels is that they often put a dichotomous framework, green or black, friendly or unfriendly, on what is usually a relative environmental improvement, more energy efficient, fewer harmful chemicals, less water use. While everybody loves simple solutions, nobody likes to be misled. Unless we can show how a product has achieved zero impact then blanket claims of greenness may lead to more scorn than adoration.

I have two thoughts on bridging this gap between the ability of consumers to process the enormous detail of product environmental impact and the believability of simple green claims. Be forewarned these are more directional than definitive.

Multi Level Product Transparency

The first level is to call out a feature, the second is to make available your reasoning for getting there.

This sounds much simpler than it is because often internal definitions rely on design intent, which is clearly necessary but probably not sufficient to call something an eco product. Unfortunately in a highly seasonal business like ours it’s quite difficult to establish rules and thresholds and once we do, innovative meaningful exceptions always seem to emerge.

This has steered us towards metrics such as kg of greenhouse gas and percent recycled and renewable as a more flexible framework but this has its own challenges in communicating measurement boundaries and supply chain variability.

The packaging real estate spent on “green” explanations is frustrating but like an author citing a reference that rarely gets looked up, there is still tremendous value in providing consumers an option for more detailed engagement.

Communicate Environmental Design Accountability

So if we go through the trouble of detailing how we measure the environmental performance of products and many consumers rarely read those details, it’s just a waste of time and paper, right?

I’ll argue its not, because when I interact with sales and consumers the feedback is not that they need to understand the boundaries of our climate model or chemical tracking, which we provide, but rather they want to understand what we are designing against and most importantly that we have a credible program to track progress. Just like consistent financial reporting builds confidence in a company’s ability to deliver financial results, consistent and credible environmental reporting builds consumer confidence that a company has the ability to deliver on ‘green’ claims.

This is not to say that it’s worthwhile to communicate immaterial details but rather to temper the unrealistic expectation that every consumer will appreciate the detail of hard won supply chain visibility we’ve established. For most its probably enough to know that we’re tracking progress, as long as they are confident that experts, thought leaders and even themselves could dig into the details of that progress at any time.

Pete Girard works in The Timberland Co. Environmental Stewardship department.  His work focuses on developing product specific measures of environmental performance, such as the Green Index, and collaboratively establishing them as part of standard business operations in the wider supply chain.

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