It was an active month of June for Big Room Co-founders Trevor Bowden, Jacob Malthouse and Anastasia O’Rourke, as they travelled key events to share with and learn from colleagues in the sustainability purchasing arena.

Anastasia presented to the ‘Informing Green Markets: What Makes a Difference and Why’ conference hosted at the University of Michigan and organised by the Erb Institute and the Sustainability Consortium on assessing the credibility of ecolabels (click for presentation PDF).

Jacob spent three days in Zurich at the ISEAL Alliance Annual Conference on Sustainability Challenges in the Textile and Apparel Sector. He moderated a panel exploring the unique social and environmental challenges found throughout the supply chain of the textile and apparel industries. The discussion focused on the difficulty of enforcement and the need to create proper incentives through reputational risks to businesses. It also emphasized the recent gains that have been made throughout the industry in regards to sustainability. A full summary of the panel can be found here.

Trevor traveled to Seattle where he participated in the latest Green Products Roundtable meeting. For a number of years Big Room has participated in this multi-stakeholder meeting. It is an initiative aimed at improving the sustainable decision-making facilities of consumers, product manufacturers, businesses and institutional buyers as well as working to define and identify green products.

Trevor also met with a number of organizations in San Francisco regarding the Ecolabel Index Application Programming Interface (API). This feature allows for the sharing of Ecolabel data with other information providers, in order to reduce the burden of creating information that the Ecolabel Index already has. Check back soon for more information regarding specific Ecolabel Index API partnerships.

Anastasia O’Rourke from Ecolabel Index will be joined by Scot Case of UL Environment and Alicia Culver from the Responsible Purchasing Network in a webinar hosted by the US EPA on June 16 at 1-2:30pm EST. The webinar is part of the US EPA’s Sustainable Materials Management Web Academy series.

Together we will be covering:

• what North American professional purchasers are currently up to in green purchasing;
• how ecolabels get used and screened for being credible; and
• what other tools and methodologies are starting to get used in purchasing, such as LCA’s, Environmental Product Declarations and so on.

Should be a lively discussion, and we are thrilled to be invited to it.

The webinar is free and open to the public, you can register here.

The US government (Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation) released an updated fuel-economy labelling system for cars on Wednesday geared towards helping consumers understand the cars’ fuel economy and environmental impact (on some key mterics).

What they did not do was give a final grade – as had been proposed – so that consumers could quickly and easily see an absolute rating (A, B, C or D) of fuel economy and air pollution compared to those of the entire fleet of new cars. Even though they avoided the “F” grade, the idea was still dropped.

Other features worth noting: the labels will include an annual estimated fuel cost for the car (assuming 15,000 miles travelled and a cost of $3.70 per gallon). Secondly, it includes a QR code that will link people to calculators online to make more detailed comparisons.

Sustainable Life Media reports that several groups have petitioned the FTC about the “EcoAd” program created by CBS and EcoMedia as greenwashing that is in violation of the FTC’s Green Claims guide.

The petition centers on the idea that the ‘digital green leaf’ shown in the ads is an ecolabel, and one that could be misinterpreted given the lack of “meaningful or verifiable criteria”. In addition, as a company selling advertising space, CBS could be conflicted in who are awarded the “label”.

The EcoAd program doesn’t itself claim to be a formal ecolabel per se. Participation in the program means that a percentage of revenue that CBS brings in from the ad is donated to local environmental projects.

However, neither the content of the ads, the products or services being sold, nor the companies selling them have to meet any criteria, which is a bit of a problem as many people are could make this inference based on seeing the stamp. In our view, the logo displayed on the ads does look rather like an ecolabel. This, combined with the fact that the program is called a “stamp” indicates a similar concept, i.e. a stamp of approval.

This, along with the Windex Greenlist case, Koh v. S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc., will be interesting bellwethers for how the FTC intends their guide to work in practice.