Vancouver — Monday, Nov 23rd, 2009 — Big Room Inc., The World Resources Institute, The Sustainability Consortium, and Duke University today launched a global survey of ecolabelling organisations.

Over 400 organisations are being approached to complete one of the most comprehensive surveys of ecolabels ever undertaken.

“This is truly a global effort. Industry, policy, academic and non-profit thought leaders from around the world came together to help develop this survey.” Said Dr. Anastasia O’Rourke, Co-founder of Big Room, “We are delighted to see it launched and are looking forward to the results.”

Ecolabels are logos that signify a product or service offers an added environmental or social benefit. As demand for eco-friendly products and services has skyrocketed in recent years, so have concerns about the quality and impact of ecolabels. Terrachoice, author of ‘The Seven Sins of Greenwashing’ identified two of these: the ‘sin of worshipping false labels’ and the ‘sin of fibbing’.

“Our aim is to create an open, harmonized index of all ecolabels in the world,” said Big Room Co-founder Jacob Malthouse “this is the first, and therefore hardest, effort. Over time, we expect this survey will regularly deliver reliable information on the ecolabel universe for anyone who wants to use them to make sustainable purchasing decisions.”

The results will be publicly released in the first quarter of 2010 and presented to the Keystone Centre’s Green Products Roundtable, a group of key green purchasing stakeholders in the US.