Since 1978 the German Blue Angel has set the standard for eco-friendly goods and services. Today, about 11.500 products within over 90 categories carry the Blue Angel eco-label. It is a state-initiated label whose criteria are adopted by an independent jury including representatives of civil organisations and the industry. In line with the international standard for eco-labelling, ISO 14024, the Blue Angel as a so called Type I Eco-label is designed to promote goods and services that have – based on the entire life cycle – reduced environmental and health impacts compared to the market average. Combined with other environmental policy instruments, eco-label initiatives can play their part to restructure the economy towards sustainable development.
In 2008 the German Federal Environment Ministry together with the Eco-labelling Board introduced a new cluster approach in which climate change is one category. To strengthen the portfolio of the Blue Angel in this regard, the Ministry and the Federal Environment Agency launched a large project within the national climate initiative. The objective of this project is to extend the product range of the Blue Angel up to 100 product categories with climate relevance by 2012. The importance and positive effect of such developments is shown by the fact that private households alone account directly for more than one fourth of all GHG emissions in Germany. And this calculation does not even include the emissions caused by the production of goods and services. It is expected that if only the eco-labelled top runner products were used, households would be able to achieve electric power savings up to 30 – 40 percent.
Instead of developing a new single-issue label based on PCF, the responsible stakeholders in Germany decided in 2009 to integrate PCF into the Blue Angel as a well-established labelling programme. They are currently investigating options to put this further into practice, e.g. how to systematically include criteria on carbon footprinting into the criteria setting of the Blue Angel and successful ways to communicate it to the consumers.
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May 2011