June 10, 2009

Green labels need more precision

My eye caught a quote from Terri Meyer Boake recently, telling an audience of architects that mindsets must shift to accommodate changing design criteria in a world in which continued, unchecked emissions of carbon into the atmosphere must stop.

She was speaking of architects to architects, of course, and was talking about carbon-neutral design, but she could just as easily have applied the need for new mindsets to all of us.

It’s time we all began to walk the walk, not just blather endlessly about compact fluorescent bulbs and programmable thermostats.

Every little bit helps, of course, as we face the twin bogies of climate change and gradual depletion of the world’s oil.

But it’s easy to install half a dozen energy-efficient light bulbs and think you’ve done your part. You haven’t.

Take the phrase “sustainable building.” Sounds great doesn’t it? But what does sustainable building mean? Or carbon-neutral design? Or zero carbon? Or net zero? Or embodied energy?

There are dozens of such phrases, all falling easily from our lips while we really may not understand what we’re talking about.

I’ve had the good fortune to attend a couple of Terri Meyer Boake’s presentations. She knows what she’s talking about, but I wish she could carry her message beyond her customary audience of architects. I wish more professionals would spend some of their time talking, in plain language, to audiences of ordinary people, most of whom don’t have an advanced technical education.

After all, if you aren’t an architect, but a general contractor, or an electrical contractor, what is your understanding of carbon-neutral design? It may match Boake’s. Or not.

I find it interesting that there is enough confusion about it in England that the government there has been holding an extensive series of consultations in an attempt to clarify just what carbon neutral means.

When the study began, the British department of energy and climate change said the phrase was in such common use that clarification was important to ensure that it was not used carelessly. It even offered a definition of its own, as a starting point for the consultation.

It proposed that carbon neutral should mean that “through a transparent process of measuring emissions, reducing emissions and offsetting any unavoidable emissions, the net calculated carbon emissions equal zero.”

There are many new technologies, new materials, new techniques designed to help us cope with the increasing fragility of our world.

One of my worries is that it has become far too easy to make quick and simple claims that might help make a sale, but which under scrutiny, mean nothing. That’s why I’d like to see a great deal more precision in language and more agreement about what common terms really mean.

Maybe government should step in and set some rules saying that net zero means exactly this; sustainable means exactly that — although there is no reason industry groups couldn’t do the same thing. After all, it was industry, not government, that first decided what the word organic means when attached to food.

Either way, the consumer, the homebuyer, the renter of office space, needs to know the words in a sales pitch mean something specific, that they’re not just what has come to be called greenwashing.

There’s a winery in southwestern Ontario that tells customers that it is concerned about the environment.

It appears to capitalize on that concern with a wine it produces. The back label tells us of a small tree frog that may still exist in the area. The front label, printed in white letters on a light green background, tells us the wine’s name: Eco Trail.

It’s a decent wine at a good price, but whether its name is just greenwashing or not, I’ll let readers decide.

Korky Koroluk is regular freelance contributor to the Journal of Commerce. Send comments to editor@journalofcommerce.com.

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