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Ever since the green consumer boom of the mid-1980s, the shopper with
a conscience has faced an ever-increasing array of goods asserting their
environmental friendliness. But as the caring 1990s dawned, concern grew
that unscrupulous manufacturers were claiming a green mantle for products
that were no more environmentally friendly than any other. In 1989, the
Consumers’ Association found that most shoppers thought green labels were
officially approved. Of the 45 per cent who thought the labels were not
official, more than four out of five people said they should be. Out of
this desire for more accurate information has come the ecolabel, an official
logo recognising a product’s green credentials. The logo is in the form
of a flower, with the 12 stars of the European flag in place of petals.

CONSUMER GOODS

In October, the European Commission hopes to introduce a system of assessment
and labelling for a wide range of consumer goods, from writing paper and
laundry detergents to batteries, light bulbs and hair sprays. The list excludes
food, drink and pharmaceuticals, partly because extensive regulations on
these commodities already exist, and partly to make the scheme more manageable.

The Commission will set the standards that manufacturers must meet to
receive an ecolabel. For a washing machine, for example, the standards could
include the energy needed to build the machine. Manufacturers will be able
to apply for a label to national organisations made up of a permanently-staffed
secretariat supporting a committee drawn from government and industry, and
consumer and environmental groups. They will submit data about their products,
such as the resources consumed to make them, to the organisations, which
will use this information to determine how a product compares with the Commission’s
environmental standards. The organisations are expected to make random inspections
to check manufacturers’ claims.

Products will either pass or fail the test – there will be no shades
of ‘greenness’. Although the scheme is entirely voluntary, the Commission
expects the lure of an official ecolabel will spur manufacturers to compete
for them, raising their environmental awareness in the process. The Commission
will award labels to individual products rather than manufacturers, and
the labels will be valid across Europe. Every three years, the Commission
will review the standards and make them progressively tougher.

Before this scheme, environmental watchdogs tended to focus almost exclusively
on a product’s performance, such as how energy-efficient a washing machine
is when operating. But the new standards will be much more testing. According
to John Hobson, head of the Directorate of Pollution Control and Wastes
at the Department of the Environment (DoE), winning an ecolabel will be
‘the definitive environmental claim’.

PRODUCT PERFORMANCE

To discover the sort of standards it would need to operate the scheme,
the Commission asked member countries to organise detailed studies of the
environmental performance of 14 categories of product. For example, Denmark
worked on a range of paper products, Germany on detergents and other household
cleaners, France on paints and varnishes, and Britain on washing machines,
dishwashers, light bulbs, soil improvers and hair sprays.

While these studies are still not completed and the standards not yet
set, the methodology used reveals how difficult it is to say what environmental
friendliness really means. The first step is to define the product and establish
categories of products that enable fair comparisons to be made. In the eyes
of the National Advisory Group on Ecolabelling, the precursor of the UK’s
national organisation, product categories should be based on ‘equivalence
of use’. This means, for instance, that one washing machine is compared
with another washing machine, and not with a washer-dryer. The definition
is further narrowed to cover only those machines for the home.

Researchers then identify the phases in a product’s life that have the
greatest environmental impacts, a so-called life-cycle analysis. Once these
have been identified for a typical machine, researchers use manufacturers’
data to assess the environmental impact of other models during each critical
phase. Then, they set standards that will enable 10 per cent of products
in every category – an arbitrary target – to win ecolabels.

Perhaps the most novel of the scheme’s analytical procedures is the
life-cycle analysis. To help them pinpoint the most critical phases, researchers
use data from manufacturers and a so-called indicative assessment matrix,
which sets out the types of environmental impact that a product is likely
to have during its production, operation and disposal, such as energy consumption,
air and water pollution, production of solid wastes, use of raw materials
and water consumption. For example, the amount of waste produced in making
sheet steel can be used as a guide in determining how much waste is produced
in making one washing machine if you know how much steel goes into the machine.
But the complexity of manufacturing processes, as well as the secrecy surrounding
them, can often make it difficult to get hold of relevant information.

POLLUTION PARITY

No matter how good the information on each phase of a product’s life,
it is still difficult to compare different types of pollution. For example,
is one kilogram of waste water discharged to a river more environmentally
damaging than a kilogram of sulphur dioxide gas released up a chimney? To
help them overcome this difficulty, researchers at the PA Group, a consultancy
based in Cambridge, are using a method called the critical volume approach.
Developed by Swiss government researchers in 1984, the CVA assumes that
the discharge limits for pollutants set down in regulations are equivalent
in terms of environmental impact. So, if the ‘safe’ limit for a known water
pollutant is 1000 parts per million and the limit for an air pollutant
is 500 ppm, these amounts are considered to be equal in impact.

Such assumptions are debatable, but at present they are the only basis
for work in this field. Other comparative methods may arise in time but
the CVA is at least easy to use. The method’s major flaw is that it depends
on regulations that are usually based on the toxicity of pollutants to humans.
Environmental scientists are trying to develop approaches that embrace the
wider environment.

The CVA method works by expressing the amount of pollutant produced
– for example, in transporting a washing machine, by lorry, from factory
to retailer to consumer – in terms of how much clean air (or water, or soil)
would be required to dilute the polluted air to the regulatory limit. If,
for instance, the regulatory discharge limit is 1 milligram of sulphur dioxide
for one litre of air and, over a typical delivery run of washing machines,
a heavy goods vehicle’s exhaust releases 10 milligrams of sulphur dioxide,
then the delivery trip is considered to have polluted 10 litres of air.
If there are 100 machines on the lorry, the amount of air polluted for each
machine is 0.1 litre. By adding up the amount of clean air, water or soil
necessary to dilute the pollutants produced at each stage of a washing
machine’s life to the regulatory limit, researchers can compare the environmental
impact of each phase of the machine’s life.

IMPACT IN USE

Research in Britain on washing machines and dishwashers showed that
the greatest impacts occurred during use. Consumption of energy, water and
detergent overwhelmed impacts incurred during other phases of the machine’s
life. Pollution caused by the generation of electricity using fossil fuel
dominates other problems. By assessing the operational impact of other washing
machines on sale in Europe, researchers derived performance standards for
submission to Brussels. In Britain, the DoE and the Department of Trade
and Industry have also recommended ‘best practice criteria’, including clear
instructions for the user, the marking of component materials to aid recycling,
and minimum wash performance requirements.

Industry still reserves judgment on the scheme, however. According to
Jim Collis, director-general of the Association of Manufacturers of Domestic
Electrical Appliances, the industry is waiting to see the final standards
before committing itself. In particular, it is awaiting the resolution of
what Collis calls some ‘deep philosophical decisions’ on the exact nature
and status of life-cycle analysis in the ecolabelling scheme. Collis is
concerned that manufacturers might be unfairly blamed for the impact their
products are having on the environment. The analysis, in its minute attention
to every phase of a product’s life, underlines the issue of responsibility
at each step. But, as Collis is quick to point out, the analysis has proved
quite conclusively that, even for washing machines made differently, the
use phase always has the greatest impact.

For the scheme to be attractive to companies, bureaucracy must be minimised,
says the Consumers’ Association, and standards must be defined so as to
guarantee that ecolabels are awarded on equal terms throughout the European
Community.

Life-cycle analysis has undoubtedly lent an air of scientific credibility
to the Commission’s ecolabelling scheme. But it can only ever be part of
the picture. The issue of whether consumerism can ever be environmentally
friendly is fraught with so many contradictions that any scheme hoping to
educate the consumer, and the manufacturer, is aiming high.

Matt Haddon is studying science communication at Imperial College,