Product suppliers or manufacturers who have products with preferred outcomes in sustainability, health or ethical supply issues need to be able to market these benefits without commercial risk and in a way that will enhance sales. The problem is marketing teams are often better at hyperbole than law. As a result in a recent ACCC market-wide survey, they found 57% of businesses were making concerning claims, i.e. they were in breach of Australian Consumer Law (ACL). On the flip side of this context is the opposite outcome. ‘Greenhushing’ occurs when manufacturers don’t make claims about the sustainability, health or ethical supply benefits of their products for fear of breaching the ACL or exposing themselves to the risk of legal action.
Fortunately, the ACCC also provides sound advice as to how to overcome this risk. One of the key solutions, and a great place to get started on your sustainability journey, is to use relevant third-party certification (ecolabels), then use that certification in your marketing materials as evidence of the claim.
As a manufacturer or product supplier, the type of certification you seek would depend on either the claims you want to make, or the markets you want to address, e.g. homeowners or professionals seeking to deliver green or healthy building ratings like Green Star®, the International WELL™ Building Standard or even LEED®.
If you want verification of a single claim e.g., ‘X% Post Consumer Recycled Content’, ‘Australian Made’ or ‘Biobased’ a claim verification label like Global GreenTag’s Manufacturer Claim Verification (McV) TAGs are the ‘ground level’ entry point for certification. They tend to be simple, cost effective and can be straightforward to achieve.
As the saying goes, ‘you can’t improve what you don’t measure’, hence the starting point in sustainability is understanding where your product stands. So, let’s look at the variety of issues to be measured.
‘Healthiness in Use’
If it is a healthier than ordinary product, you might seek a certification that assesses the toxicity risk of the ingredients and transparently reports on just that. There are a number of these services available in the sector. If your marketing and sales team want their marketing to address end users directly, and design and sustainability professionals together, then you might prefer to use a certification and transparency reporting program that also assesses and ranks ‘healthiness in use’ and further, ‘Asthma and Allergy Sensitive’ product outcomes that are more meaningful to specifiers and end users; for example, Global GreenTag’s Product Health Declarations (PHD) with HealthRATE™ ratings. GreenTag’s PHDs with HealthRATE are recognised evidence within all three rating tools mentioned above. This is a particularly cost-effective starting point to get to the first rung of the ‘certification ladder’ as it only requires declaration of 100% of the ingredients down to 0.01% or 100ppm.
Climate Impacts
If the products involved have preferred climate impacts because, for example, they have been made with renewable energy, you might want to make carbon related claims like ‘X% carbon reduced’, ‘zero carbon’ or ‘net-zero carbon’ if offsets have been used to make the claim. In this case, a life cycle analysis (LCA) and Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) or summary LCA report is needed as the next step on the certification ladder. In the context of construction products, these are required to be in specific format and content following the European EN15804 standard.
This is a more complex process and will require some quite reasonable internal and factory staff time collecting data across a range of evidence and information including energy, water, waste, resources, packaging and emissions as well as statutory compliance. The resultant LCA study and EPD report are separately peer reviewed by external reviewers. EPDs require a significant time, staff and cost investment and
can take up to 12 months to complete depending on how difficult it is to get information from the factory and suppliers.
Nature Positive Outcomes
In the last year or so, the world has come to a new awareness that loss of nature, i.e. biodiversity and ecosystem quality, is driving climate change in an interactive way and so the global call now is for both climate and nature positive outcomes in buildings…and products.
Hence, manufacturers with highly performing circular economy or biobased products that want their product to really be able to demonstrate the leadership qualities of their products and business, a focus on Nature Positive product outcomes will achieve this and future-proof their offering. Global GreenTag’s NaturePositive+Declaration and Certification TAGs will deliver this in spades, being the only product certification globally that measures the avoided impacts on nature and other benefits of circular, biobased and pro-nature products. Made easier and quicker if a product already has a PHD and EPD, they involved a major transparency report and ‘100+% Nature Positive’ rating TAG.
Modern Slavery Legislation
There is also a growing level of attention now being paid to meaningful reporting for the Modern Slavery (MS) Legislation. Recent enquiry has shown that consultancies and large property trust and construction companies are requesting products specific reporting on the products they buy. They have realized that the mandated company level reporting is not helpful in demonstrating annual improvement in modern slavery outcomes that the legislation requires. Global GreenTag’s unique Modern Slavery Declaration (MSD) and rating is product level supply chain specific MS reporting, whose key performance indicators are directly derived from the key heads of consideration in the MS Act.
Conclusion
There is ample research that shows transparency, and third-party ecolabel certifications like Global GreenTag’s mentioned above simplify product selection and specification processes for consumers and professionals alike, by boiling down the science into intuitive and simple information and graphics.
To summarise, third party Certification and Transparency reporting makes commercial sales and ‘green building’ rating processes simpler, speedier and more straightforward. The benefits are magnified with integration of services that enhance interoperability between partners like Global GreenTag and Archify. The combination of all these outcomes delivers reduced commercial risk, higher levels of brand trust, and better bottom line and brand value outcomes. So, where does your product fit?
Author: David Baggs, CEO, Technical Director & Co-founder at Global GreenTag
