Coalition wants manufacturers to go green

Green building may be growing in popularity, but green products have yet to saturate the building materials market - for many manufacturers they're a specialty, not the norm.

For builders interested in sustainability, this presents a problem: Fewer green materials in the market means less

As a solution, a Portland-based coalition of governments, design firms and large corporations is teaming its purchasing power. The Sustainable Products Purchasers Coalition's hope is that, by making a joint commitment to only buy green materials, manufacturers will be forced to produce more green options. If they don't, the coalition theorizes, they'll lose market share.

We're a consortium of businesses, governments and nonprofit organizations committed to moving the marketplace forward, SPPC Development Director Neil Collie said. We're documenting the aggregate purchasing power of our member organizations to demonstrate to our manufacturers that there's a market for sustainable products.

The coalition, which claims a collective purchasing power of $1.4 billion, includes heavyweights like the cities of Portland and Seattle, and companies like Portland General Electric and Lease Crutcher Lewis.

The coalition makes no collective purchases but rather attempts to influence the market through its members' commitment to show the highest possible preference in our purchasing and specifications, for products demonstrating superior sustainable properties, according to SPPC's membership pledge.

The coalition hopes that through its collective purchasing might it can force manufacturers to develop legitimately green products. But it also knows that as green products becomes more popular, manufacturers will be more likely to greenwash, or make false claims that their products are green in order to meet the growing demand for sustainable materials. As a safeguard, the group has posted an eco-profile form on its Web site that allows a manufacturer to use life-cycle assessment, or LCA, to quantify a product's environmental impact.

The form includes a checklist that a manufacturer can complete to prove its product meets the International Organization for Standardization's ISO 1440 standard and ensures that a third party has evaluated the life-cycle assessment as valid and true, Collie said.

By demanding that manufacturers complete the ISO 1440 checklist and sign it, Collie believes SPPC can force manufacturers to commit to developing environmentally friendly products.

They do have to sign it; they're putting their name on it, he said. We don't expect there to be 'greenwashing' - If there is, their name will be all over the place.

Life-cycle assessment, or LCA, isn't foolproof. While the assessment attempts to numerically quantify a product's ecological impact, in some cases its application can be subjective, according to Dr. Raymond R. Tan, a radiologist who has studied LCA.

For example, a gasoline-fueled vehicle will cause more smog formation, while a diesel-fueled one will cause more acid rain, Tan wrote in an e-mail sent from the Philippines.

In this case it becomes difficult to pick a winner between the two options since it is unclear whether a reduction in acid rain is worth the benefits gained in smog reduction (or vice-versa), Tan wrote. Such tradeoff problems are inherently subjective, and the final answer will depend on how the decision maker values one form of environmental impact compared to another.

Another problem with LCA is cost. To get a third party to conduct an assessment and prove its product meets ISO standards, a manufacturer has to spend money.

So far in the United States there's been a resistance to spend the money to do the work, said Rita Schenck, executive director of the Institute for Environmental Research and Education, an environmental advocacy group that promotes the use of LCA.

But U.S. manufacturers are now coming around to LCA, Schenck said, because once you have that info in hand you can use it for so many things.

You can make processes environmentally friendly, you can influence policy to get the government to give you a break or change the laws and you can use it for advertising like (how) SPCC is promoting it, said Schenck, who advised SPCC on the application of LCA. You can use it for internal training for your own people. There's all sorts of things. There's a big hump we need to get over and understand what LCA is.

SPPC takes heart in the successes of the Center for a New American Dream, a Tacoma Park, Md.-based organization that also uses LCA to impact markets. The center recently worked with a group of governments that included, among others, the cities of Seattle and Phoenix and the state of Minnesota to influence cleaning products. The city and state governments agreed to only purchase environmentally friendly cleaning products, pooling $15 million in cleaning-product purchasing power.

What happened is that once this group came out and said, 'We all agree to this standard,' other purchasers, seeing a trend, said, 'Ah- ha, I'll do it too,' said Scot Case, New American Dream's director of procurement strategies. It had a multiplying effect. When the center began, there were zero (environmentally) certified (cleaning) products. There are now more than 60 certified products and another 30 being evaluated.

The people behind SPPC know that it will take time to have a great impact on the market, but they point to the growth of organic certification for food, which in 20 years became a national standard, as a similar movement that worked. And they're confident that LCA is the right tool to make market transformation a reality.

LCA data is the best we have for understanding environmental impacts of products and services, SPPC Social Indicators Chairman Joshua Proudfoot said. It goes well beyond what goes in the trash can and what came out of the smokestack. It's the whole life cycle, and that's what's so important.