ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

‘The most sustainable solution’. ‘Better for the environment’. ‘Made with recycled plastic’. Our industry has no shortage of sustainability-related product claims. But do they hold water? And do they benefit customers? Let’s work together to get our industry’s green claims right - says Malene Thiele, global VP, ESG & sustainability at Nilfisk.

A STUDY CONDUCTED BY the European Commission in 2020 showed that more than half of green claims were vague, misleading and without justification. What’s more, 40 per cent had no documentation. Clearly, there’s room for improvement in our industry and others.

New regulations call for crucial new collaboration

Within roughly the last year, the EU has initiated new measures to protect consumers from misleading green claims. For example, new rules will forbid the use of unproven generic product claims such as ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘climate neutral’ and the marketing of products as having a reduced environmental impact based on emissions offsetting schemes.

While the European Commission focuses on claims in a B2C (business-to-consumer) context, the principles can be directly transferred to B2B (business-to-business) marketing. When companies claim that certain products have positive environmental and climate-related attributes, such claims must be scientifically proven and documented. Furthermore, companies should apply standards that have been agreed on and published throughout the industry.

Our industry has an urgent new responsibility to work together to provide the best possible basis of comparison for customers. We must agree upon common standards for how to measure product environmental impacts – for the sake of good planetary stewardship and good business.

More transparency enables more impact

When you browse various companies’ product portfolios, you need to be able to identify the most sustainable option. That is, the most sustainable option for the planet and not just the most sustainable option in one company’s product portfolio. This requires shared, standardised industry calculation methods.

Instead of creating a jungle of green claims for customers to manoeuvre, our industry needs to collaborate to improve transparency. This can be done by having environmental claims verified by a third party or it can be done by applying correct, agreed-upon industry standards. The latter is not only more cost-effective; it may prove more impactful too.

Documentation for green claims is key from a legal perspective, of course. But equally important is creating a shared basis of comparison that allows customers to objectively compare all products. In the long run, claims based on our own product portfolios can lead to arbitrary recommendations seen from the viewpoint of the environment and climate.

From the planet’s perspective, we need comparisons based on a uniformly agreed standard. We need shared principles for calculating environmental benefits such as energy efficiency or greenhouse gas emissions during the entire lifecycle of the product.

Are you comparing apples and oranges?

Nilfisk works with an internal target to make all our new product platforms 25 per cent more energy efficient than previous ones. If you also work with the energy efficiency of your products, you know what makes that tricky - more energy efficient than what?

We have industry performance standards on commercial dry vacuum cleaners, oil-heated pressure washers and floorcare. But in many other cases, we don’t have specific industry standards to compare against. And that makes it hard to express energy improvements in a reliable way. For this reason, we’re working on a European level to introduce these types of performance standards.

All recycled plastics are not created equal

Labelling of recycled plastics in cleaning equipment also needs to improve to help both customers and the planet. Recycled content in a vacuum cleaner, for example, may contain a percentage
of materials collected from recycling programmes. These materials may once have been used by a consumer, disposed of, and then diverted from landfills or incineration. This is called post-consumer recycled material.

However, the recycled content may also consist of recycled materials harvested from industrial scrap, rejects, and trimming. This is called post-industrial or pre-consumer recycled material.

Logically, my first example - the post-consumer recycled materials - is the better option for the environment. This material would otherwise have been disposed of rather than used to manufacture a vacuum cleaner. Post-consumer plastic products close the loop by diverting waste from landfills and allowing it to be recycled into something else.

But don’t get me wrong – both types of recycled plastics are of course better than zero recycled content. I suggest, however, that you ask for post-consumer recycled content when purchasing
cleaning equipment.

New EU mandates may require such transparency. And customers deserve that the environmental impact of a product’s design choices are clear. Our industry must label the percentage of post-consumer plastic when claiming percentages of recycled plastic in products. This must be done clearly and by using shared criteria. Otherwise the customer compares apples and oranges. And no one wins. Neither the companies that invest in manufacturing with post-consumer recycled material nor the customers who wish to purchase the better option from an environmental standpoint.

There’s a hole in the sustainability bucket

Life cycle assessments are another area where our industry needs to come together. A life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a framework for measuring the environmental impact of a product throughout its lifetime. The analysis can be done in numerous ways. But the cleaning industry has not yet agreed on a standard to conduct harmonised life cycle assessments.

This is a weakness for our industry – a hole in our bucket to be patched. Without a shared standard for how to measure energy usage, emissions, or resource use, our ability to prove environmental benefits from individual products is insufficient.

So where do we go from here? How can our industry patch up the holes in our sustainability bucket? To standardise and enable comparison between products, the European Commission proposes that businesses substantiate their environmental claims by using product environmental footprint methods for comparable products. One way forward for the cleaning industry is therefore initiating an industry-wide project to define common rules for well-defined product categories. This could help us all substantiate sustainability claims.

Such a project could even proactively feed into the legislative process in line with the Product Environmental Footprint methodology as defined by the European Commission. Nilfisk is proactively working with the European manufacturers’ association EUnited and its members to generate such a framework.

In the meantime, be sure to check ESG data

Admittedly, industry-wide shared standards will not come easily. Despite being a beautiful destination, it is a difficult road to travel. And shared standards will take time to develop.
While we’re all waiting, I suggest taking a closer look at cleaning product providers’ respective sustainability reports.

The European Sustainability Reporting Standards (ESRS) are starting this year. The US Security & Exchange Commission  (SEC) has climate disclosure rules coming soon. And the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) reporting space is quickly maturing into a credible, comparable, and third-party audited source of information on the companies behind cleaning products.

For my part, I encourage anyone interested in Nilfisk’s products to use the data presented in Nilfisk’s Sustainability Report 2023. There you can evaluate the credibility of and progress made towards our sustainability targets. In addition to presenting the sustainability credentials of individual cleaning products, ESG data is blossoming into a significant corporate qualifier.

While we wait for shared industry standards, let’s make sure we use these data as well. And let’s not wait longer than absolutely necessary to develop shared standards. For all our sakes.

www.nilfisk.com