If There Is No Green Seal Standard for Your Product Category
Green Seal evaluates and certifies products to specific environmental standards it has developed in an open, transparent process. If Green Seal does not have a standard in the category of your particular product, Green Seal cannot currently evaluate and certify your product. You may wish to check back in the future to see if a standard has been developed.
While some certifiers are willing to evaluate new product categories on an ad hoc basis, Green Seal believes that product certification should be based on explicit standards with pre-determined criteria developed through a careful evaluation of the product category's life cycle. This process takes both time and resources, and Green Seal must focus on those categories where there is most demand in the marketplace and resources to support the research that goes into developing an environmental standard. The process also must involve significant opportunity for input from all stakeholders; at a minimum, Green Seal proposes for public comment each draft environmental standard and publishes its response to comments with the final, revised standard.
There are, however, several options that may still be available to manufacturers where a Green Seal standard does not currently exist for their product category:
- Find funding to support development of a standard
If we do not currently have a standard covering your product type, it typically takes Green Seal six months to a year to develop a new environmental standard. This is due to the research on the life cycle of the product category, the proposal of a draft standard for public comment, the drafting of responses to the public and stakeholder comments, and the issuance of the final standard.
An environmental standard typically costs between $20,000 and $100,000 to develop, depending on the complexity of the product category and the process used to develop it. Funding sources may include industry trade associations, government agencies, and foundations.
- Identify a standard for a product category to which your product is substantially equivalent
Green Seal's environmental standards are applicable to products which are substantially equivalent in function and environmental impact to those listed in the scope of a given standard. Review the existing standards and their scope provisions to determine if a claim can be made for substantial equivalence.
Also, in some cases, products certified by other national ecolabeling programs may be recognized by Green Seal even if it does not have a standard precisely in that category. There has to be a mutual recognition agreement between Green Seal and the other program for this option; currently, Green seal has mutual recognition agreements with the ecolabeling programs
of Australia, Canada and Taiwan.
- Start with claim verification
Although inferior to life-cycle-based certification, verification of an environmental attribute can provide some marketing benefit to a manufacturer. Green Seal generally discourages this route because it is partial and therefore potentially misleading; that is, a product verified to have a certain recycled content may also have more toxic ingredients than competing brands. Green Seal will, however, generally look at other attributes to guard against such errors.
The drawback with claim verification is that neither the Green Seal Certification Mark nor Green Seal's name may be used in product advertising or marketing. Green Seal will provide a letter verifying the claim, which may be used in presentations to major purchasers or others in the supply chain.
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