We are told that one of the benefits of environmental certifications is to help business owners and executives make smart decisions that help the environment. By looking for environmental certifications on paper use, energy use, and others, it simplifies your decision-making. By selecting the certified product, you can be certain that the choice is better than a non-certified product. Right?
Not necessarily. In fact, there is a growing chorus of voices sounding caution about over-simplifying environmental decisions based on certifications alone. This is because many certifications look only at a slice of the process. An examination of the entire lifecycle may show that other, non-certified products or products with lesser-known environmental certifications actually have lower overall environmental footprints.
As one example, Phil Riebel, an environmental consultant to the pulp and paper industry, argues that while Forest Stewardship Certified (FSC) papers are heavily promoted as the right choice for greening one’s paper choices, when you look at the full lifecycle of the paper production, the management of the mills themselves should be taken into consideration (which the FSC certification does not do). On a case by case basis, this can actually have a huge impact on whether or not the FSC-certified product is, in fact, the better environmental choice.
In a recent blog post for RISI, an information provider to the global forest products industry, “Are Environmental Campaigns Misleading the Public?“, Riebel makes the following argument:
Paper with recycled and/or FSC fiber can have twice the carbon footprint of a wood-based or SFI/PEFC certified grade, just based on fossil fuel use at mill sites and purchased power. They can also be manufactured at mills that have below-average environmental performance compared to industry best practice levels.
For example, a de-inked pulp mill producing pulp from recovered paper could be landfilling all of its residual de-inking solids if it isn’t equipped with the proper boiler technology to burn solids for energy generation, or if it has no other alternative for disposal. Such mills can have significantly higher costs and environmental impacts related to landfilling than a modern wood-based mill that re-uses most of its solid waste. Such environmental performance issues can also apply to other parameters such as wastewater quality parameters and greenhouse gas emissions, to name a few.
The environmental footprint of paper depends on many measured indicators across the product life cycle and it is also very site-specific, i.e. it depends on forestry practices, environmental impacts of raw material suppliers, mill emissions to air, water and soil, waste to landfill, water and energy use, carbon footprint, chemicals used, etc.
If decisions are made based only on single elements of the life cycle, like specific types of fiber used, companies will be excluding wood-based paper grades that are certified to other systems (i.e. PEFC, SFI, CSA) and have a lower overall environmental footprint than the recycled or FSC grades.
This issue goes beyond paper. There are many industries applying environmental logos on a variety of products designed to make selection of their product the “obvious” choice. The concern is that, by accepting logos as sufficient measures of a product’s environmental footprint, we are setting ourselves up to be mislead.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that logos and certifications are helpful in the overall decision-making process, but they shouldn’t be used as the only factor. If you want to make the truly sustainable choice, you still need to your homework. Logos and certifications are simply a starting point.
Of course, the focus on environmental certification hurts the environment to some extent. For one, only the “big companies” who can get all these certifications easily will be allowed to produce green products. What about small time “inventors” and independent businessmen? Anyway, the use of household micro wind turbines is one example. Lots of people focus on solar power and bio fuels (because of the trends), but very few try to get certification for wind power products, which is a big source of alternative energy.