Source: INTRODUCTION TO ECOLABELLING
By: GLOBAL ECOLABELLING NETWORK
Synopsis: Ecolabelling is the process of identifying goods and services according to their environmental impact assessed using (predominantly) life cycle analysis.
Reflection:
Recently, The Health Care Bill was passed. Contained therein was a provision that fast food purveyors must display calorie counts alongside menu items. The theory is that, with the obesity epidemic contributing considerably to health care costs, something must be done to empower people to lose weight. If they have all the information necessary to make healthy decisions, like calorie content, they’ll be less likely to select that Chipotle burrito with 1000 calories.
I’m skeptical.
I’m not sure how to say this tactfully, but here goes. Such attempts are based on the assumption that people will understand the information, will have the capacity to process it, and a value system that will lead them to make a sustainable decision. These assumptions simply are not true for a great number of people. For some, being obese is a happy tradeoff for a delicious and convenient meal. I fear the same will be true of ecolabels. For some, 500 horsepower is more important than fuel efficiency. For others, strawberries in January are more important than local and organic. There are thousands of these decisions to be made, and the assumption that what’s lead us astray is lack of information is shaky.
That said, the above isn’t a compelling reason not to try, and for the proportion of people out there for whom those assumptions are true, real change can be made, and it’s entirely plausible that such behavior could inspire and inform others to make sustainable decisions.
That is my greatest concern with this document, but it has many strong points, and a couple of other, smaller weaknesses. I like that the authors acknowledge the constraints of life cycle analysis. It is an involved process that takes time, and even when carried out with rigor, you are left with these six-of-one-half-dozen-of-the-other situations, e.g. in the bathroom I’m confronted with paper towels and electric hand dryers. Pulpwood is a sustainable resource. Cheap electricity is not. One needs to be disposed of, the other doesn’t. One has a relatively complicated mechanism that required raw materials and energy for manufacture, and it will wear out and need to be disposed of. The other has a simpler mechanism that will also wear out and require disposal. I could go on, but you get the point. These are not simple considerations, and this is just one example of thousands. So, we do the best with the best information we have, and we adapt to new information, a process discussed in the docoument.
The final strength of Intro to Ecolabelling is its acknowledgement of market forces. The argument can still be made that sustainable decisions are more expensive, the effect of which ranges from making a product less desirable to putting a product out of reach. If ecolabelling is to be part of the solution, it needs to acknowledge and account for this
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If you go to http://bit.ly/bhFboq you will discover a collection of 325 ecolabels. Obviously not all are of equal legitimacy. Not only is the public challenged with interpreting labels but they are faced with trying to figure out which ones to trust. From what I have read, most of the public have simply decided to trust none of them. This is the flip side of the secrecy coin that so many companies (and governments for that matter)invoke - if someone insists on transparency, give them so much information that they simply can't make sense of it all.
ReplyDeleteWe are slowly seeing labels that are trusted emerge (LEED for example). It won't be long before GreenSeal establishes itself in a similar position. The question will be whether the government bans labeling at that point because it leads the consumer to believe the non-labeled product is inferior. Now that wouldn't be fair, would it?