The European Commission is proposing EU-wide methods to measure the environmental performance of products and organisations, and encouraging Member States and the private sector to take them up.
Currently, companies wanting to highlight the environmental performance of their products face numerous obstacles including the need to choose between several methods promoted by governments and private initiatives. As a result, these companies may be forced to pay multiple costs for providing environmental information and consumers are faced with confusion resulting from excessive labelling that makes products difficult to compare.
For example, a company wishing to market its product as a green product in France, UK and Switzerland would need to apply different schemes in order to compete based on environmental performance in the different national markets. In France, it would need to carry out an environmental assessment in line with the French method (BP X30-323); in the UK, it would need to apply the PAS 2050 or the WRI GHG Protocol; and in Switzerland, it would need to apply the Swiss approach which is currently under development.
According to the latest Eurobarometer on Green Products, 48 % of European consumers are confused by the stream of environmental information they receive, which affects their readiness to make green purchases. A number of industrial groups have called for a pan-European approach built on EU-wide science-based assessments and Life Cycle Analysis. This is because of concerns that multiple initiatives at Member State level would run contrary to Single Market principles, confusing consumers and increasing costs for industry.
To address these problems, the European Commission has launched the Single Market for Green Products initiative, which proposes the following actions:
- establishing two methods to measure environmental performance throughout the lifecycle – the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) and the Organisation Environmental Footprint (OEF);
- recommending the use of these methods to Member States, companies, private organisations and the financial community through a Commission Recommendation;
- announcing a three-year testing period to develop product- and sector-specific rules through a multi-stakeholder process;
- providing principles for communicating environmental performance such as transparency, reliability, completeness, comparability and clarity; and
- supporting international efforts towards more coordination in methodological development and data availability.
The three-year testing period will be launched soon. An open call for volunteers will be published by the Commission on the Product Environmental Footprint and the Organisation Environmental Footprint sites, inviting companies, industrial and stakeholder organisations in the EU and beyond to participate in the development of product-group specific and sector-specific rules. On these sites, some preliminary information is already available about the objectives and expected timing of the test. For more information, please see this link.