Spring Has Sprung Green
By Scott Kriner, Green Metal Consulting
During some unusually warm spring weather last week, I ventured into the Walmart SuperStore’s Lawn and Garden center in beautiful Macungie, PA. A stroll down the aisles of fertilizer, grass seed, and patio furniture suddenly made me stop dead in my tracks. There I saw an item for sale that made the following claims:
• Durable
• Made from recycled material
• A warranty against color fade
• Resistance to wind
• Clean, safe and easy to install
No, these were not the points on a label for prepainted metal roofing (although the same claims would apply). Instead this was for shredded rubber mulch. Many of you may have seen this product before, but this was my first time. After looking around that area of the store I discovered a rubber mulch “circular pad” in the shape of a 2"-thick tree skirt to place around the base of the tree trunk. I also saw a wide variety of rubber landscape stone. There was even weed block fabric made completely from recycled plastic bottles.
Like seeing a robin as the first sign of spring, I had now witnessed the first sign of Walmart’s conversion to green products. It quickly reminded me of Walmart’s announcement last year to develop a sustainability index for all of the thousands of products that they sell. That announcement led to the formation of the Sustainability Consortium as a separate organization working to develop a user-friendly sustainability index that Walmart and other companies could use. The Consortium is a group of academics and companies with the goal of “establishing the scientific standards to measure the sustainability of consumer products.”
The shredded rubber mulch also reminded me of the danger of greenwashing. I’m not suggesting that the claims on the packaging were untrue. But I was struck by how similar these claims were to so many other “green” products on the market that are totally unrelated to rubber mulch. Fortunately there is activity underway to address the greenwashing from the hundreds of eco-labels in use today. Those activities take the form of verification, validation and certification of many products’ claims. There is a growing interest in using third party verification or testing of a product’s claims in order to validate it.
We are actually seeing this take place in the ENERGY STAR® program. After the memorandum of understanding was signed between Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy to strengthen the ENERGY STAR program, newly proposed rules and procedures were announced last month for the ten different product categories in the ENERGY STAR program. The Roofing Products Program is one of those that is now considering how to change from a self-certified qualification program to one that allows the products to be validated for their reported solar reflectance values. One way that has been proposed is to use third party, independent accredited laboratories to test all materials being submitted to ENERGY STAR. This would be consistent with the way some other codes and standards are requiring validation of product performance. The UL Environment group has anticipated this trend in the industry by offering Environmental Claims Validation, Sustainable Products Certification and Energy Efficiency Certification programs.
The trend toward Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) continues to strengthen. An LCA is meant to be used for process improvement in terms of reducing the environmental impacts of a process relative to the industry average. Many are also using the LCA data for comparative marketing purposes. But there is a growing awareness that LCA data will be necessary for generating Environmental Product Declarations (EPD). We can think of an EPD as the environmental equivalent of a nutrition label on food. Instead of showing the level of certain ingredients or Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved servings, an EPD can display the particular product’s impact in specific categories such as global warming potential, acidification, or water use. But once again, the question of verification has come up with regard to EPDs. For example, if Walmart successfully establishes a Sustainability Index, based on LCA and/or EPDs, who will police it? How will the products coming from China and other offshore locations be verified that their labels or indices are accurate and done according to protocol? This remains an interesting and important question that the green community needs to address.
One thing is for sure. There may still be companies and individuals standing on the sidelines waiting for the green “movement” to fade away. But when Walmart begins selling products that meet the green standards defined by, and imposed by, the largest retailer in the world it will signal that the green “movement” has finally become a “market” that will impact Main Street USA.
Scott Kriner, MCA's Technical Director, is the president and founder of Green Metal Consulting Inc. He is a LEED Accredited Professional who began his career in the metal construction industry in 1981. His company is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council, the California Association of Building Energy Consultants and the Residential Energy Services Network (RESNET). Scott can be reached by email at skriner1@verizon.net, or by phone at (610) 966-2430. You can also visit him on the web at www.greenmetalconsulting.com.
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