Pages

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Universal Ecolabeling: an "eco-Black-Spot" concept

Nowadays  more and more people cares about environmental-friendly goods. Ecolabeling is often used to distinguish such goods from regular goods. 

But there are several issues:
  • there are a lot of ecolabels, provided by different organisations with different standards so quality of the given ecolabel usually is uncertain;
  • ecolabels are difficult to recognize: if you unaware about given ecolabel and know nothing about authority, that gave it - you are likely to miss the point that this is ecolabel, or even you can be tricked by companies with some green-coloured sign with a word "eco", this leads us to the following point -
  • often they can't be trusted - companies like to place their own labels that states that product is friendly to environment to attract customers, but these labels are just a trick and has nothing to do with reality.
So I would like to propose another approach. Do you remember BP re-branding after  Deepwater Horizon explosion and infamous oil spill? I hope you do. What if we will oblige companies to put negative labels on the products which production causes significant threat to environment?! - A universal "eco-Black-Spot" for environment abusers!

Pros: 
  • we won't need external sertification organisation to confirm that this company deserves an eco-Black-Spot - an environmental agencies already have the necessary information;
  • nobody will forge eco-Black-Spot for their goods;
  • forged (self-made) "ecolabels" will instantly fail being alongside with the eco-Black-Spot.
  • companies will try to wipe out an eco-Black-Spot from their products by actual contribution for preservation of the environment.
Cons:
  • m-m-m... I don't see any. Do you?
And what about design of the eco-Black-Spot? I believe it will be convenient to use something like this:
or this:


No comments:

Post a Comment