Requirements on Consumer Information about Product ... - ANEC

Consumer Information about PCF
Product differentiation is particularly difficult for narrowly defined product groups
“Typically LCA-practitioners use a combination of primary site-specific data and data from
existing data-bases. Taking into account the complexity of product systems it is almost unthinkable
to conduct LCA without the support of such data bases that help to fill gap and
save time and resources. Nevertheless, the use of such data bases has one considerable
consequence for environmental labelling: Especially for narrowly defined product groups, in
which system alternatives are not considered, many product features like material composition
will likely be very similar or even identical.
The subsequent product differentiation will therefore be based on some few environmental
impacts like content material and energy consumption in the use-phase. Nevertheless, existing
labelling schemes for computers already address these issues and differentiate product
models accordingly. Therefore, in such cases LCA will not yield any added-value, but just
higher efforts for data collection and compilation.” Prakash 2008
Concerning the differences between different products from the same product group, such as
two desktop computers or two washing machines, PCF results show small deviations similar
to that of LCA results. This is for two reasons:
On the one hand nobody is able to gather primary data for all materials, processes etc.
necessary to produce a desktop computer or a washing machine. The costs would be
tremendous, studies unaffordable. Therefore the use of secondary data from commercial and
non commercial databases (e.g. EcoInvent, GaBi, GEMIS) is common practise. Anyway,
supplier–producer relations may change rapidly which also justifies the use of generic data.
One disadvantage, however, can be that effective differences of products in some cases
cannot be represented by the secondary data and therefore the calculated similarity does not
comply with reality and – as for LCA – even may exceed error margin.
On the other hand, it has to be acknowledged that two washing machine models in reality do
not deviate so much from each other concerning their content of plastics, metals and even
electronics, even if they are from different producers. Additionally, the use phase makes up
about 90% of the overall PCF of a washing machine and thus diminishes differences in the
production phase again. The same can be stated for many other complex industrial products.
Besides that the measurement of the energy consumption of a washing machine is based on
very detailed test protocols. Even then the results have a limit of accuracy of 10%. The use
of such protocols – which has to be assured by Product Category Rules – is a prerequisite of
making even small differences visible.
17