Product eco-labels guide consumer choices towards options with best environmental performance. The EU Eco-label and the Nordic Swan eco-label indicate that the product is among the best in terms of environmental performance, and encourages producers and service providers to offer environmentally friendlier choices, based on life cycle thinking.
The project “The Nordic Swan Ecolabel, Circular Economy and Product Environmental Footprint” explores how the product specific award criteria of the Nordic Swan promote circular economy and how they could be further strengthened in terms of e.g., product durability, material circulation and its reuse.
The project further studies the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) methodology, currently being developed by the European Commission, and how the information provided by the life cycle assessment based methodology could be used by the Swan. The goal of the PEF methodology is to enhance the product environmental information provided to consumers and to improve the reliability and comparability of the information. The project examines the synergies between the Swan and the PEF and explores possibilities for the Swan in the future to also indicate an excellent PEF performance of a product.
Finally, the project analysed what kinds of product environmental information are used by the different policy instruments in the fields on integrated product policy, sustainable consumption and production, and circular economy. The main question was, if the PEF has such properties that it could have a larger role in product policy instruments (for example, ecodesign directive, green public procurement) than life cycle assessment (LCA) has had.
Contact
Development manager Ari Nissinen, Finnish Environment Institute SYKE
firstname.lastname@ymparisto.fi
, tel. +358295251457