Many businesses are making the effort to market their products as green — and they’re relying on a fairly wide variety of labeling systems to do so. Retailers, governments and manufacturers have all come up with eco-labels of their own. The situation makes for inconsistent labels and confused consumers.

Marketers know that recognizable brands are crucial to maintaining consumer interest — if a buyer can’t figure out what guarantees that a product is green, he’ll leave it on the shelf. It’s time for marketers to convince their companies to go with a consistent green label.

Consider the ‘Certified Biodegradable’ label. Scientific Certification Systems offers it for products they’ve audited. While SCS has a thorough evaluation process, the name isn’t recognizable and consumers may not want to rely on their expertise. Furthermore, the way the label is phrased may scare a few people off. It explains that the product “breaks down into carbon dioxide, basic minerals and water.” But an uneducated consumer may not realize just what that means. Buyers are rapidly being conditioned to think of carbon dioxide as evil — if it isn’t entirely bad, why would we want to reduce our carbon footprints? It’s a complex issue, of course, but a good label needs to minimize confusion as much as possible.

Even more importantly, this ‘Certified Biodegradable’ label isn’t used across the board. The Federal Trade Commission allows manufacturers to simply slap the word ‘biodegradable’ on any product that meets certain guidelines. The FTC has taken action against companies making false claims of biodegradability, but those actions have been few and far between. Furthermore, the FTC allows for further designations, like ‘biodegrades without forming microtoxins.’ Is that better or worse than just plain ‘biodegradable’? A scientist might be able to say, but is Mom going to be able to figure it out when she’s standing in the cleaning supply aisle at the store? Probably not. It’s pretty likely that Mom will get frustrated and wind up purchasing the cheapest product.

Just as the Food and Drug Administration requires standardized labels for nutritional value and such, it’s time that the FTC starts requiring some standardized labeling for green products. We don’t need anything fancy: even a list of terms with easily available definitions could do the trick, if the FTC is willing to do some enforcement work. The reason that labels like ‘biodegradable’ are so confusing is the fact that there is no effort, either on the part of the FTC or any other governing body, to make sure that the label only winds up on products that are actually biodegradable.

Image courtesy GreenerChoices