• Eco-labels are a tool to help buyers make informed choices
• They are awarded for achieving set performance levels
• The performance criteria differ from label to label. It may be a single issue, or several, based on the product or service life cycle
• ISO 14001 is not a performance standard, but a management system used to manage improve performance

A bit more detail...

An eco-label is best used as a tool to help you choose goods and services that fit in with certain environmental requirements. The various labels set performance requirements that have to be met before the label is awarded, avoiding the need for buyers to make their own checks.

There is a wide range of eco-labels generally, and the main reason for this is the differences in what they cover. Some are quite specific, looking at just one aspect of environmental performance: for example FSC and PEFC, which are concerned solely with forestry, and the new carbon labels. 

Others are more general - they look at the whole life cycle of a product and set criteria based on the main impacts. The EU Eco-label and Nordic Swan are examples of this. However, for some buyers these labels may not be demanding enough in some areas, so combining labels is the answer: buying a paper that has both forest certification chain of custody and an EU Eco-label, for instance.

Certification, such as ISO 14001, often gets mixed in with eco-labels, but it is quite different. If a company is certified to ISO 14001, it means that they are managing their impacts on the environment in a systematic way and continually improving performance, to meet the management system requirements of ISO 14001 - not that they have achieved a set standard of performance. ISO 14001 is often used as the tool to reach the performance standards required by eco-labels.

The next pages of this section go into more detail about the different labels and systems.