Accordingly, we have now begun the process of emailing every ecolabel in the Index, with an invitation to update their profiles.

In return, we are offering ecolabeling organizations free access to Ecolabel Index PRO, which allows subscribers to view all the data on each label as well as find and compare labels side-by-side.

If you receive an email from us, please take a moment to ensure your profile is up to date. It is of utmost importance to us and our users that our data is as current as possible.

The Ecolabel Index team will continue to review ecolabel data and update our Index with new labels. If you have any questions or would like to suggest an addition to Ecolabel Index please email: support@ecolabelindex.com.

Before launching the service to all ecolabels in the Index, we are emailing twenty ecolabels to ask for their feedback on how the service works. If you receive an email from us, please do take a moment to test out this new service. We’d welcome your feedback on how it works, so we can fix any issues before launching it to the broader ecolabel community.

The Ecolabel Index team will continue to focus on conducting quality control and accuracy checks on Ecolabel Index data, as well as identifying new ecolabels.

If you have questions or want to participate in the trial, please email us directly.

We hired Andre through the UBC Arts Co-op Program. He’s a UBC student that has completed a Major in Political Science, is finishing a second Major in Economics and is interested in pursuing a law degree. Andre’s academic focus is on macroeconomics and the role of contemporary governments.

He brings a wealth of experience to Big Room, having completed previous co-op terms with the federal government at DFAIT and INAC as well as with a local non-profit organization.

Andre also spent his childhood in three different countries, living in the USA, UK and Canada. He is very excited about joining the Big Room team, raising the profile of the Ecolabel Index, and working to augment the platform’s analytics and metrics.

We are in the process of researching a “list of lists” of recommended ecolabels that we can integrate as an additional, hopefully useful, indicator for ecolabel users. If you are an established environmental organisation that maintains such a list, we’d love to hear from you. If you have advice on how to integrate this feature, let us know as well, and thanks!

Contact us on Twitter at @ecolabels

• Top 10 queried categories (in order): North America, Europe, Building Products, Tourism, Asia, Food, Textiles, Global, Electronics, Cosmetics. Change over previous month: Food dropped from 2nd to 6th, electronics and cosmetics joined top ten at 9th and 10th.
• Top 10 most visited ecolabels (in order): Blue Angel, Nordic Swan, EcoLogo, EU Ecolabel, AB, Singapore Green Label, India Ecomark, Carbon Reduction Label, BDIH Certified Natural Cosmetics, Cradle to Cradle. Change over previous month: EU Ecolabel jumped to 4th, BDIH and Cradle to Cradle joined top ten at 9th and 10th.
• General site usage: 8,656 visits (up 7%) | average user spent 3.5 minutes on the site | 31,000 pages viewed (down 4%) | average of 3.6 pages viewed per visit.

Key Developments

• ISEAL launched the first version of their Impacts Code of Good Practice “Assessing the Impacts of Social and Environmental Standards Systems” at a conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil (view the announcement).
• An alliance of think-tanks and government agencies released a comprehensive overview of ecolabels & standards for the following commodities: forestry, coffee, cocoa, tea and bananas, at a conference in Berne, Switzerland (view the announcement).

Analysis:

Site visits and pageviews rose 34 and 50% respectively, likely as a result of press coverage around the launch of Terrachoice’s latest study (See Bloomberg BusinessWeek article) and controversy around the EU Ecolabel certification of two Sinar Mas paper products (See Just Means article).

We also recently made some tweaks to improve overall site performance and load times, and enabled search by additional categories, which we hope will improve the usefulness of the site.

We recieved 53 responses. Of these, 56% came from the private sector with the rest coming from non-profit, government, academic and ecolabelling organisations.

Key Results

• 91% of respondents are interested in online training and webinars on ecolabels. We are pleased to confirm that we plan to launch a series of regularly scheduled ecolabel webinars beginning in the new year. If you have ideas for topics or would like to speak or be interviewed as part of one of our EI Pro webinars, please email jacob[a]bigroom.ca.
• The most supported feature was for a way to compare ecolabels side-by-side. 85% of respondents said that this would be very useful. We are pleased to confirm this functionality will be added to the site before the end of this year.
• There was also significant demand for performance indicators, with 81% of respondents saying that this would be a very useful feature. We recognize that this is a hot potato in the field, so when we move to apply any methodology here, we are considering doing so in an ‘open-source’ fashion. We welcome your comments and guidance on how best to develop and then overlay performance indicators for ecolabels.
• The next most supported proposed feature was for a reference library on ecolabels and green standards. We have been logging articles and research on ecolabels that we find particularly useful, and look forward to also pushing that online later this year.

Our Analysis & Actions

We think we can release the ‘watch-list’ and the ability to show whether an ecolabel has been endorsed by an environmental group or groups before end of year. Both features scored well, though support was more mixed. These features will be prioritised behind scoping work on the indicators, comparability and a resource library.

There was a good base of support for cross-referecing ecolabels against existing classification systems. We have already done some heavy lifting here, and are looking at five different systems, two for products, one for industry sectors, one for commodities, and one for impacts. We hope to have this functionality in place, with initial mapping done, by early next year.

In closing, here is a selection of general comments we received and responses. Thank you to everyone who helped us sharpen our pencils for this next round of work.

Selected Comments & Responses

Just found you. I work at a small green products business and am taking a Masters of Environment and Business, so I’ll be around for awhile and will be able to provide better feedback next time around. Keep up the good work!

Ecolabel Index: Thanks! Look forward to your feedback.

Focus on verification of claims, performance of standards, and exposing greenwashing or risk being just another passing fad.

Ecolabel Index: I certainly hope we’re not that! Nose will be kept to the grindstone.

Drill down on each eco-label to gather information on specific eco-label attributes

Ecolabel Index: Agree. This is a mammoth task. The International Trade Centre is doing some great work in this area and we hope to be able to integrate and reference the fruits of that effort.

Make sure you have all the new ecolabels out there.

Ecolabel Index: Getting there! You can suggest labels here. All suggestions are reviewed internally before they are posted.

A way to link with other users/professionals and be part of a network- perhaps enabling users to get in touch with each other through Linked In.

Ecolabel Index: Good idea! Will look into this.

Your assessment of UL 880 when it is available for this purpose.

The governance of an ecolabelling organisation – must haves, does and don’ts.

Ecolabel Index: These sound like good webinar topics!

I would definitely like to be able to search various ecolabels by country and product type. For instance I’m not interested in the Australian organic ecolabel, but am for ones in the US and North America. Also if I’m going to write a specification for a cleaning product or coffee/tea or wood, I would like to search and find ecolabels related to those items.

Ecolabel Index: We agree, this is coming this year.

The resource is excellent – thank you for creating it!

Ecolabel Index: Thanks so much! It’s been a long road and we hope to continue to provide a useful service in support of green markets.

For “performance indicators” the criteria & methods of allocating scores would need to be very transparent.

Ecolabel Index: Yes. Our philosophy for this site basically grows from RFC 2418‘s commitment to openness, transparency, and consensus as one of the most fruitful ways to build standards. We welcome comments and thoughts here, as noted previously.

After launching the site on a new platform this June (see this article describing the effort), we are now working on how to integrate a ‘Pro’ layer onto our existing service.

Ecolabel Index Pro will focus on providing services for companies, governments, non-profits and academics that need detailed information and tools on ecolabels. Consumer oriented portions of our data will remain public and accessible.

We are looking forward to your suggestions and ideas. Thanks in advance for helping make Ecolabel Index better.

Surprisingly enough, many labels are either not posting lists of those certified, or their data is out of date. But some trends are definitely emerging – Scandinavians, Germans and organic food eaters take note!

Here is a link to watch a livestream netcast of the event. We look forward to seeing other label geeks there, in person or otherwise!