BSR Insight Articles About Sustainable Consumption
Going from ‘What’ to ‘How’ in Sustainable Procurement
Celine Suarez, Manager, Advisory Services
Making sense of the increasingly dizzying array of product certifications, labels, data and other sustainability initiatives is a challenge, even for experts. While the best of these efforts provide comprehensive, accurate data on a product's many sustainability attributes, it can be exceptionally difficult to synthesize the data and judge the relative "sustainability" of different products. Procurement professionals face the additional challenge of integrating these criteria into purchasing decisions that must also account for traditional considerations like cost, quality, and delivery. Even initiatives such as the Sustainability Consortium, which takes a comprehensive, science-based approach to conveying the full lifecycle of products' sustainability impacts, will need to be applied to thousands of products that companies purchase before the system can realize its full impact. So how can companies start using the information from the Consortium and other initiatives to evaluate things like light bulbs, bath towels, or milk? How can companies begin to unpack and compare the lifecycle sustainability attributes of the products they procure? If a light bulb is Energy Star certified, is that the best indicator of its overall energy efficiency? If a bath towel was made with certified organic cotton, but that cotton was shipped from Uzbekistan to Saskatchewan, is it considered sustainable? If a gallon of milk is hormone-free but made on a factory farm, is it healthier for humans, or is that benefit outweighed by the fact that it's polluting the soil? A single product might be rated on as many as 20 to 30 sustainability metrics covering issues from natural resource extraction, material inputs, manufacturing, carbon footprint, waste, water use, packaging, and more. BSR's Center for Sustainable Procurement (CSP), an initiative funded by Hilton Worldwide, is examining how procurement professionals can more effectively and efficiently integrate sustainability considerations into their day-to-day purchasing decisions. Read more
BSR at Rio+20
Julia Robinson, Communications Associate
Rio+20, an important milestone that marks two decades since the first Earth Summit, kicks off this week in Brazil. BSR--which is also celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2012--is excited to join companies, NGOs, and governments to develop new strategies and innovative partnerships for sustainability. BSR Senior Vice President Eric Olson, South America Director Joe Sellwood, and Advisory Services Manager Alison Colwell will attend the UN Global Compact Rio+20 Corporate Sustainability Forum from June 15 through 18: Read more
BSR, Hilton Launch Center to Help Companies Integrate Sustainability Into Procurement Decisions
Celine Suarez, Manager, Advisory Services
As more sustainability data has become available in recent years, many companies are struggling with how to apply this information to the products they purchase. Today, BSR and Hilton Worldwide launched the Center for Sustainable Procurement (CSP) to help global business procurement managers integrate sustainability data into their purchasing decisions. Funded by Hilton Worldwide and managed by BSR, the CSP will develop: Read more
Worn Out: How Fashion Can Inspire Sustainable Consumption
Jonathan Morris, Associate, Advisory Services
Last November, Paris-based PPR unveiled the world's first complete environmental profit-and-loss account for its Puma brand, offering consumers a behind-the-catwalk glimpse into some of the sustainability impacts of their trainers and tracksuits. The company has now committed to extend the practice to all of its luxury, sports, and lifestyle brands, including iconic luxury houses Gucci, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, and Bottega Veneta, by 2015. H&M, one of the bastions of fast fashion, is pushing its new Conscious Collection, with pieces made from organic cotton and recycled plastic bottles. These are just two examples of the latest movement in fashion to shine the spotlight on itself and examine its sustainability impacts. Why is fashion concerned? The industry has reached a tipping point: After years of molding consumer behavior to refresh their wardrobes with inexpensive and accessible clothing every change of season, the fashion sector is now trying to buck that trend. Yet the industry has run into difficulty when engaging the consumer, who are either confused about sustainable options or don't buy sustainable products, even when they say they want to. For several months, BSR has been working with the Danish Fashion Institute on the NICE Consumer project to inspire changes in government policies and business practices to help consumers make more sustainable choices in the purchase, use, care for, and disposal of fashion items. What follows are our insights based on detailed research, consultations, and webinars with key actors from business, civil society, and government. Last week, we delivered a framework summarizing our recommendations to Connie Hedegaard, the European Commission's climate action commissioner and representative of the Danish EU Presidency, in order to engage government and offer eight industry-inspired policy recommendations to foster more sustainable fashion. ##NICE Consumer Insights What's old is new again. Fashion doesn't have to invent a more sustainable model--it can simply borrow from the past. Quality, longevity, repair, and reuse of garments have been part of a fashion heritage that dates back to pre-industrial times, and studies show that consumers are ready to revive these values. A recent Young and Rubicam report revealed that consumers are beginning to reject "cheap and more"--and the fashion industry can capitalize on this by offering higher-quality but fewer options every season. Honest By, which claims to be a "100 percent transparent" brand, designs couture products of high quality and provides full access to the material source, labor cost, and environmental impacts of its clothing. They have a struck a nerve: Founder Bruno Pieters has received emails from customers who have rejected more frequent purchases to save money and invest in Honest By garments. One desired behavior, many communication vehicles. Defining a desired consumer behavior helps to guide industry activity, but promoting that behavior among demographics that can be divided by age, gender, income level, and geography requires different marketing strategies. There is still work to be done to think through how sustainability messaging is best communicated in fashion. Education is key--in classrooms, boardrooms, and storefronts. Brands, designers, and nonprofits alike have emphasized the need for education on sustainability, and not just for consumers. Stakeholders are pushing for curricula in primary schools on the importance of sustainable consumption, for the inclusion of extra-financial information in boardroom decisions, and for sustainability training among retail store staff to help guide consumer decisions. Labeling has received plenty of attention, but consumers are still confused. Fashion stakeholders agree that more does not mean better, at least when it comes to labeling. As the number of sustainable fashion labels and certifications grows, consumers and retail stores carrying brands with these labels have become confused--or cynical--about those messages. The seeds are sown, but collaboration is needed to cultivate them. One of the largest insights to be drawn from our NICE Consumer work is that the many initiatives in the realm of sustainable fashion have produced just as many different ideas on terminology, targets, standards, and measurements about what sustainable fashion is. Continued collaboration, coordination, and oversight of these various efforts are key in driving sustainable choice for consumers. ##What's Next in Sustainable Fashion Consumption On May 3, during the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, the NICE Consumer team delivered eight policy recommendations to the EU presidency, highlighting government's role in fostering more sustainable fashion. These recommendations cover, among other things, the integration of sustainable fashion curriculum into all levels of education, the support of product-transparency disclosures, and the stimulation of voluntary agreements covering extended producer responsibility. But the fashion industry is not content to stop there. Picking up on the momentum gained in these past few months, the participants of the NICE Consumer have discussed next steps toward sustainable fashion consumption. The recently released "Framework for Achieving Sustainable Fashion Consumption Through Collaboration" serves as a starting point for defining stakeholder roles, but the hardest work is yet to come. Last week's Copenhagen Fashion Summit only reinforced this point. The need is urgent. Fashion stakeholders now must now come together on next steps: Perform baseline studies to understand how far they have come to date, establish time-bound goals and targets, and start measuring progress. Collaboration will continue to be critical in these discussions, and the NICE Consumer is ready to help. Read more
Eco-Rating Electronics Products: Has the Time Come?
Vijay Kanal, Former Director, Information and Communications Technology Practice, Advisory Services Virginia Terry, Former Director, Advisory Services
How safe from toxic substances is that cell phone my children are playing with? How energy efficient is it? And what kind of take-back program does the manufacturer offer at the phone’s end-of-life for safe recycling or disposal? These are some of the questions customers are starting to ask about the environmental features of cell phones and other electronics products. In almost every opinion poll we’ve seen, consumers say they are concerned about the environmental (and, increasingly, social) impacts of the products they use. And yet information on these and other questions remains largely elusive. Without it, customers cannot make the right product choices, and changing consumer behavior remains one of the bigger impediments to sustainability. One of the solutions to this challenge has been eco-labels, which have grown substantially in the last several years. Today, hundreds of these labels vie for consumers’ attention on products and services ranging from food to cleaning supplies to flowers and even cosmetics. As the number of these labels has grown, it’s not clear that they are having the desired effect of helping consumers make more sustainable choices. Some of them, such as the EnergyStar label, cover only one aspect of the product’s performance. Others don’t explain what the information on the label means. Despite the proliferation of labels, easy-to-understand, consistent, and comparable information about the environmental impacts of products is not readily available to consumers. While we need to continue to experiment with new ways to engage consumers, when it comes to labels, there is a need for greater clarity and greater harmonization among the labeling schemes. Based on work BSR recently completed, we are using this article to examine some of the successes and challenges still to overcome in eco-labels related to the electronics industry. ### Case in Point: The Wireless Industry’s Approach to Labeling and Beyond When it comes to encouraging better and more sustainable purchasing decisions, the mobile industry provides a compelling opportunity: Hundreds of millions of cell phones are bought and discarded each year, so even small changes in consumer behavior could drive improvements in the environmental and social attributes of these devices, which could have a huge impact on the planet and society. But what will it take to make this happen? To date, a few companies have developed new ways to provide information for consumers about the environmental attributes of the phones they sell. UL Environment has developed a set of interim sustainability requirements for mobile devices as the basis for green certification, and Sprint now requires that all manufacturers of the phones it sells go through the certification process. Sprint, Telefonica, AT&T, and Vodafone have introduced, or are about to introduce, eco-rating systems to inform customers and nudge more manufacturers to improve the environmental (and social) attributes of the devices they make. With their purchasing and distribution power, and hundreds of millions of wireless consumers, these carriers are in a position to heavily influence the design and manufacturing process of the tens of millions of devices they buy and resell from manufacturers every year. Later this year, AT&T’s new eco-rating system, which was developed with support from BSR, will be used to rate most post-paid AT&T-branded handset devices. Based on 15 performance criteria that address sustainability impacts across cell phone life cycles, the system will provide consumers with information, at different levels of detail depending on consumer preference. There will be a label on the package with an aggregate score, additional information on a card at the point of purchase, a code that consumers can quickly scan for more information, and more comprehensive details on the cell phone’s performance against each of the 15 criteria on AT&T’s website. Vodafone’s eco-label provides a score between 1 and 5 based on 162 questions the phone manufacturer must answer. Sprint, using the UL Environment interim standard, which covers over 50 performance criteria, will provide information indicating whether the phone is certified or has achieved platinum-level certification. When fully implemented, these systems will provide customers with simple or detailed information, depending on their needs. They will also allow the industry to track the extent to which consumer behavior is influenced by environmental considerations in the cell phones they buy. For example, by tracking consumer preferences for mobile devices achieving higher eco-ratings and by quantifying “hits” on web-based environmental information, the industry will begin to measure trends in how the ratings systems are used by consumers. ### Overcoming the Challenges One of the biggest challenges for both the wireless industry and consumers is the potential for conflicting information. Since retailers and carriers sell identical products, it’s possible for the same product to be rated differently on different systems. If competing rating systems come to different conclusions about the same product, then consumers will rightly ignore them. How is the industry going to achieve this consistency when their competitive spirit demands that they try to gain any edge over other companies? On this issue of environmental attributes, these companies must ultimately work together for the sake of consumer satisfaction and the sake of the planet. This is particularly important as several industry associations and standards bodies such as GSMA, ITU, and UL Environment begin to develop eco-rating systems for cell phones. These developments provide an opportunity for the industry to put competitive issues aside and collaborate on a system that is consistent, transparent, and easy to understand. Such a system does not have to be limited to mobile devices. If consumers embrace an open and comprehensive communication system, and it leads to changes in consumer behavior, we foresee a day in which other industries also develop eco-rating systems for their products. And if eco-ratings of mobile devices cause even a slight shift in consumer awareness and demand, we are confident that manufacturers will design and build more environmentally friendly and socially responsible products. The mobile device industry and the broader electronics sector could provide leadership on these important issues, and we believe that success in this category will lead to consumer demand for similar information and more sustainably oriented choices in other categories. A rising tide will lift all boats. Read more
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