U.S. Green Product Council Debated

June 17, 2009

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With more than 300 different organizations claiming to certify various products and services as “green” or “sustainable,” industry leaders are pondering whether the time has come for a unified U.S. Green Product Council.

Leaders say that possible consumer confusion on just what constitutes “green” may be reason enough to consider a unified green standard, reports Detroit News.

Consumers can’t be expected to verify the legitimacy of each and every green certification system, said Steve Odland, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Office Depot Inc., who spoke June 16 at the National Summit session on Sustainable Business Solutions in Detroit.

“Maybe it’s time for a U.S. Green Product Council which could then take on the task of mapping all these various certifications,” he said, according to the article.

To Odland, it would make sense to divide such a standard into three levels of “greenness”: light green, green and dark green, reports the Detroit Free Press. Indeed, Office Depot is moving forward with just such a tiered rating system.

Fellow panelist Thomas Lyon, a professor and director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, also is in favor of a common standard. “We’re getting a proliferation of labels and the average consumer can’t tell which label is better,” he said.

The Federal Trade Commission has taken up the subject of late. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has charged Kmart Corp., Tender Corp., and Dyna-E International with making false and unsubstantiated claims that their paper products were “biodegradable.”

In a June 9 hearing before the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection entitled “It’s Too Easy Being Green: Defining Fair Green Marketing Practices,” representatives from the FTC and other organizations spoke on the topic.

“Consumer interest in conserving energy and protecting the environment will likely result in continued environmental marketing,” James Kohm, Director of FTC’s Enforcement Division, said during the hearing. “Competition based on green claims drives businesses to greater innovation, which ultimately benefits consumers by increasing the availability of the types of green products and services they desire. For the marketplace to thrive, however, companies must compete on the basis of legitimate advertising claims and consumers must be able to rely on those claims.”

Also at the hearing, Urvashi Rangan, Director of Technical Policy for Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports), said consumers face a “dizzying array” of labels — from specific claims like “no phthalates” to vague and undefined claims like “natural” and “green.”

“Of the certified label programs, there are several viable business models including public, private, non-profit, for-profit—that may or may not be of interest to a particular consumer,” Rangan said.

When Consumers Union surveys green labels, it looks at criteria including: verification, consistency, transparency, stakeholder input and independence.

“Comprehension and accessibility are challenges for all green claims. Whether specific or broad, the maintenance and evolution of standards over time must be addressed,” Rangan said.

Government and industry should work toward defining what constitutes fair green marketing practices, said Scott Cooper, Vice President of Government Relations for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

“In order to make this vision a reality, we need to make more efficient use of the standards and conformance resources that are already in place . . . and we need to identify every gap that exists,” Cooper said.

ANSI offers accreditation in sustainable forestry, environmental management and food and agriculture best practices.

The European Union has an official eco-label program, which recently began certifying foods.

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Reader Comments

Dara O’Rourke from the University of California, Berkeley with a wide range of colleagues from multiple disciplines and campuses has already created the GreenGuide.com a website with full disclosure on many, many products. He just launched an iPhone app that reads the bar codes and provides the data.
It would appear this work is already done, it just needs to be embraced and expanded. That sounds like a funding issue.

Tom Larsen | June 18th, 2009

Yep that’s what we need, more government or quasi-government regulation and intervention to tell us what’s what; what’s green, what’s good and bad and how much government we need to take care of us too. I have a very green product and I submitted it to Green Peace and the Sierra Club(2 overly bureaucratic entrenched entities) and neither of them saw it as being green enough for their point of view. The point is large organizations are traditionally slow moving and more interested in their own preservation than they are in trying to advance new ideas and your suggested Green Council would do more harm than good. Let the people decide for themselves….they have a brain afterall.

Jeff9 | June 18th, 2009

Tried to find the greenguide.com but it doesn’t appear to be a live site. Is there another url?

Laura | June 25th, 2009

I don’t see a reference to greenguide.com in the story. Do you mean the FTC green guides that are being updated? You can find those at http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/grnrule/guides980427.htm

Environmental Leader | June 25th, 2009

I think the website for disclosures on the different products is actually goodguide.com

Shannon | July 2nd, 2009