Environmental Product Certifications: Carbon Footprint, Ecolable, Accredited Self-Declarations, EPD, Made Green Italy
Product environmental certifications aim to evaluate the environmental impact of a product considering its entire life cycle, from raw materials to disposal.
In addition to the Carbon Footprint (see article Organizational Environmental Certifications: the Carbon Footprint Certification), which makes it possible to determine the environmental impact of not only organizations, but also individual products, through an estimate of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere (according to the UNI CEN ISO/TS 14067:2014 standard), there are three other different types of environmental labels, established by the ISO 14020 series standards:
- Voluntary eco-labels subjected to external certification by an independent body (including the European eco-label ECOLABEL)
- Eco-labels based on environmental self-declarations without the intervention of an independent certification body (including: Recyclable, Compostable, etc.).
- Eco-labels certifying the environmental impacts associated with a product's life cycle, according to specific parameters and subject to independent verification. These include, for example, the Environmental Product Declarations (EPD).
In particular, the EPD is a document designed to improve environmental communication between producers (B2B) and distributors - consumers (B2C), which provides objective, comparable and credible information regarding the environmental performance of products/services. This information does not intend to provide evaluation methods, preferability criteria or minimum performance levels. The EDP is based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the methodological foundation ensuring that the information is objective (according to the standards of the ISO 14040 series); it is applicable to all products or services regardless of their use or positioning in the production chain; comes with a classification into well-defined groups of products/services that are thus comparable; it is verified and validated by an independent body which proves its credibility.
Finally, the Italian Ministry of the Environment and the Protection of the Territory and the Sea has put into force, starting from 2018, the voluntary national scheme Made Green in Italy, which is based on the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology, defined in Recommendation 2013/179/EU of the European Commission. The PEF is different from the Carbon Footprint, since its aim is to measure the consumption of natural resources generated by the entire life cycle of a product/service. On a large scale, this methodology measures the surface in terms of land and water that the human population needs to produce, with the available technology, the resources it consumes and to absorb the waste produced.
This voluntary declaration aims, among others, to strengthen the image, appeal and communicative impact of "Made in Italy" products in order to support their competitiveness on national and international markets.