Check the Label: A Guide to Green Designations for the Home

The EPA’s WaterSense  program is designed much like Energy Star but with a focus on testing and certifying water-saving products in the home. Thus far, the program has tackled toilets, faucets, showerheads, and irrigation services and technologies.

Saving electricity and water is an easy sell for these two programs. Often overlooked, however, is taking steps to improve indoor air quality (IAQ). The GREENGUARD Environmental Institute has given homeowners a leg up on the battle for better IAQ, with its GREENGUARD Indoor Air Quality certification program. The program certifies low-emitting interior building materials, furniture, and finishing systems, testing each product for chemical emissions. GREENGUARD currently certifies over 200,000 products for 130 different manufacturers.

Ecolabels
Although the practice of ecolabelling is not new, the growth in green products and certifications has brought the term more to the forefront. The Energy Star, WaterSense. and GREENGUARD certifications both fall into the ecolabel category, but there are other ecolabels as well as organizations and websites that catalogue “approved” ecolabels or green certification programs.

Ecolabelling.org carries an extensive list of green buildings, services, and building products without particular selection criteria. Building Green’s selection process for their “GreenSpec” list of products is somewhat more demanding, albeit limited to journalistic research, e-mail and forum discussion, and builder recommendation. 

The Global Ecolabelling Network is an association of third-party labeling organizations from around the world. The United States is represented in the network by Green Seal, a group that establishes green standards for product categories and accepts applicants for certification within those categories.

The Canadian-based EcoLogo is North America’s oldest ecolabel with over 7,000 certified products representing 120 categories, including building and construction. “The criteria set for certifying a product evaluates the entire lifecycle of the product,” says Lise Beutel of TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, managers of the EcoLogo program. “We can look at everything from the raw materials used to the final stages of the product’s usage.”