Green Alliance press release
UK - leading companies design a pathway to greener products
The Designing Out Waste Consortium under the aegis of environment think tank Green Alliance, has published a new report A pathway to greener products. The consortium, which includes Asda, Boots UK, Royal Mail, Unilever, Valpak and Veolia, is calling on the new coalition government to help all businesses to improve the environmental impact of the products they produce and sell.
The consortium believes that consumers at all levels of the market want and expect businesses to provide them with better products with lower environmental impacts. As a result, businesses can and should play an important and proactive role in designing out waste. But it argues that commercial and policy drivers must be correctly aligned to incentivise the right products, and the government can play a catalytic role in the development of these drivers at EU and global level.
The report recommends that a progressive government framework for designing out waste is put in pla! ce. This will entail:
1. Evaluating product impacts
The government should take a lead in facilitating the development of a practical, low cost and widely adopted way of evaluating product impacts and identifying where action should be taken. This should be done in discussion with businesses, and working with the relevant EU and global institutions.
2. Tackling the product shadow
Government should introduce new measures to tackle the generation of commercial and industrial waste. These could include ambitious sectoral targets and requirements for companies to measure and routinely report material input and output.
3. Towards improved product standards
The government should facilitate the development of a broad set of lifecycle based sustainability performance standards for products. Companies! and trade associations should be encouraged to set their own baseline s for products and to use these to produce improvement strategies to meet these standards.
An expanded Ecodesign Directive could be one way to ensure that these standards apply across all member states. The UK government should take a proactive stance in EU discussions about how best to do this.
4. 'Upstream' incentives to design out waste
Government should explore the potential for upstream incentives to encourage businesses, both in the UK and abroad, to design out waste and design in recovery.
Hannah Hislop, Senior Policy Adviser at Green Alliance, said:
"For the first time leading UK and multinational companies have come together to call for a major overhaul in the government's approach to designing out waste. Consumers don't want to spend time researching their purchases or comparing labels. They don't want simplistic green spin, but neither do they want a barrage of incompre! hensible information. They want environmental responsibility built into all products. But businesses also need a clear government framework and incentives, in the form of commercial and policy drivers, to reconfigure their products along greener lines."
Copies of the report A pathway to greener products (4 MB) are available from Green Alliance's website at:
http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/uploadedFiles/Publications/reports/PathwayGreener_28June.pdf