Requirements on Consumer Information about Product ... - ANEC

Consumer Information about PCF
emissions on all new cars, the publication of national guides on the fuel efficiency of
new cars (for Germany see e.g. DAT 2009), the display of posters at the dealerships
and the inclusion of fuel efficiency information in printed promotional literature (EU
2007). It has to be added at this point that the obligatory EU label is disregarding the
following points:
‒ Most important: there is no benchmarking system (such as for the EU energy label
or in the Swiss Energieetikette) that enables consumers to see whether a specific
CO 2 emission figure is low or high, resp. whether a specific car performs bad or
good. A colour or letter code would help immensely.
‒ Precombustion is not included (e.g. production of gasoline).
‒ Only CO 2 is considered, no other climate relevant emissions.
‒ CO 2 emissions of production and end-of-life are not included.
• In Switzerland, the Energieetikette (energy efficiency label) is mandatory for cars and,
apart from the fuel consumption, also displays the CO 2 emissions in gram per kilometre
(TCS 2009). For Germany, Verkehrsclub Deutschland e.V. proposed an A-G labelling
scheme similar to the energy efficiency labelling related to the fuel consumption (VCD
2007).
• Apart from that, there exist several ranking lists for new cars 8 from nongovernmental
institutions that include CO 2 emissions as one criterion among several others (such as
noise, emission of NOx).
• There even exists a Product Category Rule for passenger vehicles that would enable
the preparation of an EPD for cars 9 . Volvo published an EPD calculator for its two most
sold truck models 10 .
The extent of improvement potential concerning climate relevant emissions is high. The PCF
of the use phase can be reduced significantly by buying an efficient car and by using it
environmentally sound.
Also the potential of product differentiation is high. The differences in PCF, especially of the
use phase, between the available car models are rather large. The production and end-of-life
phase does not vary that much, taking into account the whole life cycle. Still it would make
sense in later steps to determine basic data on the production of a restricted number of
different size classes of cars (e.g. small, medium, large).
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9
See e.g. www.autoumweltliste.ch (in German), www.ecomobiliste.ch (in french), or www.vcd.org (in German).
PRODUCT-CATEGORY RULES (PCR) for preparing an environmental product declaration (EPD) for
“Passenger vehicles” PCR 2005:3 Version 1.0 2005-03-15. http://www.environdec.com/pcr/pcr0503_e.pdf.
10 See http://www.volvo.com/trucks/uk-market/engb/aboutus/Environment/environmental_product_declaration/epd_calculator.htm.
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