Overview

In this section we provide links and commentary on Australian and International environmental labelling standards.

Eco-labels are a valuable source of information on preferable products, and on their particular characteristics.

Eco-labels will not generally give explicit informtion on product constituents or standards, but will indicate if products meet the criteria set for standards.

Not all eco-labels are created equal, and it is important to understand what the strengths and weaknesses of these are. Over time this section will be expanded in ecospecifier to address these issues.

Nordic Swan

The Nordic Swan is one of the worlds most respected third-party eco-labelling standards, and regarded as one of the toughest to obtain. Swan standards typically include a wide range of issues including materials used, chemicals, energy consumption, wastes and packaging.

For an overview of available building product standards click here

The Good Environmental Choice Label

Good Environmental Choice Australia Ltd (GECA) delivers Australia's national life cycle based ecolabelling program with a commitment to credible product environmental information for sustainable consumption. 

The organisation is an independent non-profit public company and has it's head office in Canberra, Australia. A key element of their work is the management of the Good Environmental Choice ecolabelling certification scheme established under the guidance of the ISO 14020 series of international standards for a range of consumer and building products on the Australian market.  Click here to view their website.

The Good Environmental Choice Label is a national environmental labelling and declaration program advising Australians that consider the environmental effects of their purchasing decision. The program considers key environmental impacts along the products life cycle and delivers independent product environmental information for a wide range of consumer and building products. The program is internationally and nationally recognised.  One of the key program objectives is to allow manufactueres that deliver quality products with preferable environmental performance to gain the benefits of market environmental preference thereby increasing their competitive advantage.

Through such third party ecolabelling it is expected that industry environmental innovation can be recognised and supported by the market and new products will be developed that have a lower environmental impact in order to capture the commercial rewards of consumer environmental preference.

The program is the Australian member to the Global Ecolabelling Network and follows the ISO 14 024 framework for third party environmental labelling and declaration.

For an overview of available GECA building product standards see here.