Energy Star Not Becoming ‘Multi-Attribute,’ EPA Official Says

SAN DIEGO -- A senior Energy Star official from the EPA faced polite hostility from CE executives at a CEA Industry Forum workshop on green labeling Tuesday over what the executives described as unfriendly directions the Energy Star program has taken over the last year. Several in the audience, for example, said they were unhappy that Energy Star’s CE ratings were trending toward including far more green “attributes” than just the energy efficiency criteria for which the program was conceived.

The EPA official, Una Song, Energy Star program manager, also defended the agency’s move early this year to launch third-party certification for CE products as one that would “bolster the integrity of our program.” The EPA’s move toward third-party certifications followed a blistering March 2010 Government Accountability Office report in which agents went undercover and found that Energy Star product certifications were extremely vulnerable to fraud and abuse.

A Cobra Electronics questioner from the audience asked Song why Energy Star resorted to third-party certifications instead of improving the quality of its own “field audits.” Don’t third-party certifications “punish the many for the few bad outliers?” the questioner asked. Song said EPA acted to put Energy Star product certifications in line with those of Energy Star ratings for commercial buildings and new homes, which already had third-party certifications. But she conceded that “I know that doesn’t answer your question” about whether the agency instead could have just improved its own field audits. EPA is “in conversations” with manufacturers, certification bodies and labs to determine how well third-party certifications are working and how much they're costing. But since the third-party program only started earlier this year, “we don’t have a full year’s worth of data” yet, she said.

Under questioning from the session’s moderator, Bill Belt, CEA senior director-technology and standards, Song denied that Energy Star ratings for CE products were “going multi-attribute.” Contrary to what many in the CE industry think, “when we look at products, energy efficiency is still our focus,” Song said. “That is how we expect to differentiate products, and we look to help to transform the market in terms of energy performance.” But she also conceded that with CE gear, “we do look at other performance features, quality features, things that consumers are looking for. So as we see there’s a need or demand from consumers, we'll incorporate them into our product specifications. However, we're not looking to differentiate products on those. We're probably splitting hairs here, but we're not becoming multi-attribute. We are continuing to look at other aspects of the products we think consumers are going to expect from the Energy Star program."

For example, toxicity is one area that EPA is looking to incorporate into its Energy Star CE ratings, she said. “We're looking to incorporate RoHS. ... We're not looking to go beyond RoHS. We're not looking to differentiate products on RoHS. It’s a widely accepted standard. We're just looking to make sure that Energy Star products meet that standard.” EPA also is looking to incorporate “design for recyclability” criteria in its Energy Star ratings, she said. For that, Energy Star wants to “leverage” the EPEAT standard, she said. “Again, we're not looking to do anything different. We're looking at standards that have been put in place that have wide acceptance that we're looking to incorporate into our products because in conversations with stakeholders and partners, our understanding is that this is something that consumers are expecting from these types of products."

But Belt then asked Song to cite evidence that consumers are indeed looking for these attributes in Energy Star-certified products. “They're not looking to the Energy Star program for these other attributes,” she conceded. “I think they're looking for these other attributes in consumer electronics. And so to the extent that Energy Star covers consumer electronics, we want to make sure that our products are associated with the best performance and the best quality, because the last thing we want to do is be associated with a technology or a feature that is a laggard in the industry.”

That the Energy Star label, according to Song, is recognizable among 80 percent of the U.S. population doesn’t necessarily mean that green groups won’t adopt green labeling schemes of their own, several panelists said. For example, the Sustainability Consortium is working on several “communications vehicles” for the consumer, said Louis Molinari, the consortium’s working group director for electronics and toys. “This could be a label, it could be a poster on the wall, it could be an application on your iPhone,” Molinari said. “It’s a means of communicating to the consumer what impact that product has” on the environment, from its production all the way through to its end-of-life recyclability, he said. “The issue here is making sure the information that retailers communicate to the consumer is consistent, from retailer A to retailer B, from product A to product B. There needs to be consistency, because, I don’t know about you, but if I went to a store and I saw different label ways of communicating, I wouldn’t know what to do, what to pick from."

The consortium is not married to the idea of devising an Energy Star-like label, but rather some sort of “consumer-facing vehicle,” Molinari said. “It does not necessarily have to be a label on a box. It can be an education process that takes place for the consumer that helps them understand what some of these principles, what some of these attributes are. Today, energy is something that’s obvious to most consumers. But when you talk about toxicity or you talk about land use or things of that nature, they may not have an understanding of what that means, but yet it’s an impact to that product in its production cycle."

Some manufacturers are labeling their products as EPEAT-certified for sale through Best Buy, Costco and Walmart, “but that’s voluntary on the part of the manufacturer,” said Jeff Omelchuck, director of the EPEAT program at the Green Electronics Council. “The point of these programs is to provide information to consumers, and I don’t make any assumption that a label is the right vehicle to do that in the long term. It’s expedient, it’s the traditional way, but we are very open to other means to deliver this information credibly and flexibly and innovatively."

However, UL Environment is now designing a sustainability standard for cellphones and wants to incorporate points-based green ratings from that standard on a label, said Michael Sakamoto, the company’s business development manager. “Some of the [wireless] carriers came to us about a year ago and said we need to do something quickly,” he said. “In this country alone, we're disposing of a huge amount of devices. Something like 350,000 phones are getting thrown out every day. There’s two things to look at. Obviously we need to change the end-of-life issues, but also we need to get manufacturers to use a lot less toxic materials and how do we impact materials acquisition in a way that’s much more sustainable?"

UL Environment’s “interim sustainability requirement” (ISR) program, when it’s complete, will assign a “point value” to every phone it certifies, based on several key environmental criteria, such as packaging, hazardous materials and product stewardship, Sakamoto said. The program bypassed the American National Standards Institute because that standardization process can take years, and speed was of the essence, he said. However, work continues on a full-fledged ANSI standard, and the ISR ratings program will be phased out once the ANSI work is finished, he said. -- Paul Gluckman

CEA Industry Forum Notebook

PayPal will begin trials of a suite of digital wallet offerings for retailers in Q4, Anuj Nayar, director of global communications, said on a panel about mobile commerce. “We've had a digital wallet system for 13 years, but what’s changing is how it’s being used,” he told Consumer Electronics Daily on Tuesday. PayPal is bringing its transaction experience to offline shoppers for the first time as the line between online and offline shopping begins to blur, Nayar said. The suite of merchant options, which retailers will opt in or out of, includes a smartphone app for iPhone and Android phones, a PIN pad where consumers can enter personal information codes and a PayPal payment card with a standard magnetic stripe that contains users’ PayPal account data, he said. Unlike standard credit cards, the PayPal card will give consumers the choice of how they want to pay for the purchase once the charge has posted to their PayPal account, including checking and PayPal accounts. The 2011 trial will be to a limited number of stores that are part a “large national brand-name retailer,” Nayar said. He wouldn’t name the chain, nor would he identify the 20 retailers PayPal plans to trial with in the first half of 2012. The company’s measure of success for the trial before determining whether to roll it out on a full-time basis, will be based on retailer response, Nayar said. In addition to a payment option, PayPal will offer merchants services including demand generation of targeted local offers, payment transaction management for consumers even weeks after a purchase and a no-cashier option, he said. “Why do you have to go through checkout when you can pay as you go through the store?” -- RD

Tech spending in relation to overall durable goods is “holding on OK,” said Shawn DuBravac, CEA director of research, during a research session on the current economic landscape. Consumers have cut back “significantly” on purchasing vehicles, major appliances and home furnishings, and “tech has benefited from that,” he said Wednesday. But that “pent-up demand” presents a risk for the CE industry, DuBravac said. Today’s car is about 10.6 years old, and the average car has a lifespan of about 14 years, he said. “The stock of older cars is older than it’s ever been,” he said, and consumers and businesses will soon need to allocate resources to replacing the “aging fleet,” which could put pressure on other durable goods categories, including technology. -- RD

CEA inducted 11 members into its Hall of Fame Tuesday night, bringing to 170 the number selected since inception in 2000. Among the highlights of the evening’s event were comments from Ralph Baer, inventor of the first home videogame system. “Pushing 90,” as he told attendees, Baer came up with the idea of using TVs for interactive game play in 1966, according to his bio. His Odyssey game system, which went on sale in 1972, found its first high-profile licensee in Atari, which later released the arcade video game Pong. Baer’s Simon game is still available from Hasbro. Of the 150 patents under Baer’s name, “With any luck, I'll license a couple of them this year,” he told CEA members. Retailer inductee Sandy Bloomberg, founder of electronics retailer Tweeter, fondly recalled selling upscale hi-fi in the ‘70s to people for whom a stereo “was the most important purchase of their life.” Customers would go home, set it up, “get stoned and listen to music really loud,” he said. Tweeter reached its peak in 1996 with 150 locations before shutting its last store in 2008, according to Bloomberg’s bio. The chain started the first retail price protection program in 1993, promising to refund customers the difference if they found an item advertised at a lower price within 30 days of purchase. Inductee Eli Harari, founder of SanDisk, spoke of driving down the cost of flash memory by 50,000 times to enable affordable memory solutions for PCs and other devices. “That’s what enabled this technology to disrupt film, disrupt tape and disrupt floppy disk drives,” he said. Inductee Sam Runco, founder of Runco International, which was sold to Planar in 2007, received the California trademark on the term “home theater” in 1986, according to his bio. Runco is credited with bringing the first aspect ratio controller to the market, allowing users to select an aspect ratio for projectors to match the original theatrical format of 2.35:1, 1.85:1 or 16:9. The latter became the format for HDTV. Expressing appreciation to judges in attendance, he quipped, “Thanks for doing this while I'm still alive.”