60-Member Sustainability Consortium Developing Green Measuring Standards

LOS ANGELES -- The Sustainability Consortium, a research group of retailers, tech companies and universities, is developing standards for “measuring and reporting consumer product sustainability across various categories,” including TVs and computers, Kevin Dooley, a senior adviser to the consortium, said at the Entertainment Supply Chain Academy’s Edge Conference. Formed in July 1990 at Wal-Mart’s urging and with its funding, the consortium has 60 members, including Best Buy, Disney, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Toshiba, said Dooley, a professor of supply chain management at Arizona State University.

The consortium is working on measurement and reporting standards for desktop computers, laptops and monitors and in the fall will begin work on TVs, Dooley said Thursday. “Our goal here over the next three years is to take a category like consumer electronics and really begin development on all the product categories within that sector."

There’s “a multitude of drivers that are pushing us to better understand and communicate the sustainability of our consumer goods,” Dooley said. “Every six months, there is yet more and more evidence that consumers are in fact interested in green products. That interest certainly differs across different product categories, but there’s no way around noticing that there’s a very strong trend in that regard."

Still, “the typical consumer is also equally confused about how to make a better environmental choice,” Dooley said. There are no fewer than 650 eco-labels around the world, many of them “not based on sound underlying science,” he said. “Many of these standards are very powerful for what they cover. For example, Energy Star is certainly the most widely known eco-label that exists right now. However, it really only deals with energy efficiency and doesn’t deal with other aspects of the product life cycle and environmental and social impacts that may exist."

Consumers want to be sure the sustainability information they're given about new products is “transparent,” Dooley said. They want data “that’s based on good science and has been vetted by a third party, if at all possible,” he said. Energy Star has been a “tremendous” success story the last 10-15 years, he said. “However, in the last couple of months, we've seen criticism of Energy Star come up, primarily due to the lack of an auditing and validation system that would really give confidence in the results."

There’s increasing demand for “product-level reporting” on sustainability, but “the only way we can make this viable is to have some level of standardization and commonality about how we report product sustainability from business to business and business to retail,” Dooley said. “As a supplier in the supply chain, you don’t want to have to report 10 different ways to 10 different retailers. Likewise, retailers want a common way in which all their suppliers report product sustainability in a uniform way."

The consortium’s “initial focus here is on developing those measurement and reporting standards that bring commonality within product categories and then eventually across product categories,” Dooley said. In its effort to be as transparent as possible, the consortium vows “to be truthful about uncertainty,” he said. “We think that it is irresponsible to show retailers or professional buyers or consumers information in a quantitative form that has no sense of the uncertainty surrounding that number.”