Consumer Products Blog
Raising Standards – Do we need a new rating system?
By Roger Mainwaring-Burton - Last updated: Monday, September 5, 2011Energy labelling has change the way that consumers shop. From its first introduction in the early 1990s to its most recent manifestation (since the original draft in 1992, EU legislation has been updated 12 times), it has concentrated on one thing – Energy. Consumers have developed an understanding of the ways that energy equates to cost and manufacturers and marketeers are always quick to capitalise on this in advertising.
However, this performance metric may be coming to the end of its useful life. Typically the rating has been applied to products where their use has the most significant impact on the environment, a category into which most consumer products fall. However, as the amount of energy used during operation is reduced by increased efficiency drives and technological advances, it becomes a less significant portion of the whole product’s life cycle. Currently, there is no measurement of the total impact of a product over it’s whole life (cradle-to-grave) for the consumer to compare. For instance, if a vacuum cleaner 5 years ago had 90% of its environmental impact during the usage phase, and only 10% during production, then a rating related to energy is a reasonable assumption. If then the energy usage is cut by 50%, but the production is doubled (introduction of more complex systems), then the total saving is only 35%, as oppose to the 50% suggested by the numbers that the consumer sees.
This then touches on a bigger question: Does the consumer really want to reduce their environmental impact, or do they just want to save money?
I recently attended the IFA trade show in Berlin, and saw many products advertised where the manufacturers were clearly counting on the user’s ecological conscience overriding their wallet. There were many examples of integrated automatic sensing systems that would reduce energy usage, where the reduction in operating cost would not cover the increase in production cost (at least with current energy and water prices). So with this apparent egalitarianism, should consumers be given the right numbers to inform their decisions?
This is where the inevitable buzz-word of today comes up – Life Cycle Assessment (or LCA). This is a fantastic tool for assessing how much impact a product, person, process or even building have on the environment, but it is not without flaws. A LCA is full of assumptions about the process, which can result in two entirely reasonable assessments providing completely different results. This ambiguity is reflected by the associated standard – ISO14040 – for which a company cannot be accredited, only individual studies can be approved. Herein lies the issue with the introduction of LCA as a metric generator for consumer goods. It is not currently viable to do an independent, peer reviewed assessment of every product variant released onto the market, and in order to provide a comparable figure with other products, all of the same assumptions would have to be made in the contesting study. But perhaps the predicted use cases are different according to different companies’ research, and therefore they have different design assumptions? Without legislation, it is too easy to doctor these results, but ensuring fair, comparable assessments will be no mean feat.
Manufacturers must lead the way if the legislation is to be representative and applicable. The process is already in many sectors of industry, but it has so far had the most debate in automotive. Jaguar Land Rover are currently using LCA as a design tool in order to avoid the creation of products with a good ‘eco-headline’ that have simply transferred the damage to other stages of their life. The EUP (Energy Using Product) Directive is the first stage to a more representative figure for impact of a product. Are consumer product companies ready to meet what the market demands?
