Requirements on Consumer Information about Product ... - ANEC

Consumer Information about PCF
personal health (e.g. organic food products) and private economy (e.g. energy efficiency).
Consumers’ acceptance of detailed and complex environmental information is higher for
more complex and expensive products. Private consumers desire environmental product
information in the form of simple symbols, without detailed information and text sections.
Selecting environmental information and presenting it in a way which is understandable for
common consumers is a challenge. On the one hand, the information should be simple, but
on the other hand it should be sufficiently comprehensive and precise for the consumer to
make the “right” choice, distinguishing between products with different environmental
characteristics. Schmidt and Poulsen (2007) conclude that private consumers in general
prefer declarations that are much simpler than those developed in the framework of
ISO 14025 and implemented in national or international EPD-schemes.
Interesting is a last aspect to be mentioned here: Schmidt and Poulsen (2007) assess an
apparent risk of detailed quantified environmental product declarations creating a false sense
of control that could benefit products with an environmental product declaration, regardless
of the content of the declaration. The same could be the case for products with a PCF label
and one without, making products with some kind of PCF label look better to consumers then
others without such a label.
Besides general requirements concerning the communication of environmental information to
consumers in the last part of this chapter there will be a focus on the communication of PCF
results to consumers. In the German PCF Pilote Project (PCF-Pilote 2009) and in the
Memorandum Product Carbon Footprint (Grießhammer and Hochfeld 2009) several
requirements for climate-related product labelling were formulated. Among them aspects are
included that were already mentioned earlier such as credibility, comparability, consistency
and understandability. PCF-Pilote (2009) concluded:
“Providing a total CO 2 footprint figure in the form of a static carbon label, as is already
practiced by some companies, does not make sense and is not very relevant for consumer
decision making. A figure of this kind suggests a precision and conclusiveness which cannot
be achieved using the current state of methodology.”
Grießhammer and Hochfeld (2009) added that basing on PCF it is not possible at the
moment to perform
• product comparisons of multiple products carried out on behalf of different clients and
by different practitioners,
• public comparison with competing products in ways that are acceptable under
competition law (e.g. through reporting of CO2e values or use of CO2e labels).
For methodological reasons alone it is therefore at present not possible to use CO2e labels
for the purpose of comparing competing products. Even if further development has occurred
e.g. in international standardisation and Product Category Rules this will only theoretically be
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