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Green Home Label
Italy
Casa Toscana / Green Home is an ongoing environmental quality label for the Tuscan furniture industry. It was piloted in 1997 and has its origins in PhD research work
The objective of Green Home is to stimulate, develop and promote the virtue of eco-friendly features in furniture products to Tuscan SMEs. The theme of being ecologically sound will function as a positive regional peculiarity which will help endow their products with an extra dimension of value. It can also become an instrument of competitiveness in foreign markets. The main idea driving the project is the need to define a strong local identity to be used by the manufacturing system as a means to enter and compete in a global market.
Accordingly, the project aims to create an environmental quality label for Tuscan furniture where the “environment” becomes a central part of a products value. The label will be defined in keeping with the principle of eco-sustainable exploitation of natural resources and of gas emissions discharged during the manufacturing period and by assessing the products environmental impact.
The product is principally targeted at furniture manufacturers who have premises in Tuscany so anyone awarded the label has to have both registered offices and premises in the region. At another level, the project is targeted at designers working in this sector with the aim of enhancing their knowledge and sensibility with regard to ‘eco-sustainability’. Ultimately there is the consumer and the project aims to influence the purchasing habits above and beyond those who are already aware and responsive to the issues of sustainability.
The staff that studied the definition of analysis methods included some personnel from Consorzio Casa Toscana and of Centro Sperimentale del Mobile (CSM). These are the two bodies that promoted the project and that represent Tuscan furniture enterprises. Other staff involved are scholars and researchers from the Architecture Technology and Design Department of Florence University and from the Forestry and Environmental Technologies and Science Department of the Forestry and Agriculture Faculty. Other experts came from the Instituto Ambiente Italia, Milan who examined the environmental impact evaluation methods and checked the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). There was also a Technical Committee which validated the regulations for the attribution of the label involved and other experts. The project has pulled together different scientific / creative competences (i.e. architects, designers, wood technicians, environmental engineers, etc.) and this is one of the most innovative aspects of the project. Some of whom were more used to dealing with products than numbers, quantities and performance values.
The project has been a three-stage process:
- The first step was the definition of a scientific methodology of analysis as support for the project. By means of an environmental ‘health-check’ involving 30 Tuscan furniture companies, the project carried out an LCA of products which took into account all stages of the production process. From procurement to manufacturing, from packaging to transportation, from usage to divestment, the end result was a database enabling us to evaluate the environmental impact of each type of material used and each category of product. The environmental quality of the product was evaluated on the basis of three impact categories; damage to human health, damage to the ecosystem and damage to fossil and mineral fuels.
- The second step was the definition of the criteria necessary to grant the label. Two quality bands, obtained by moving from the lowest impact value of the company’s production, determine the environmental assessment. The products not achieving these bands cannot receive the label. Every three years the levels are reviewed and reduced, with the objective of achieving a continuous increase in a products environmental quality and sustainability.
- As a third step, a Scientific-Technical Committee (STC) was established with a group of experts who have worked on the definition of the rules for awarding the label. Each product is evaluated according to its environmental performance: the SCT is called upon to evaluate the eco-impact of the product and compare it with the limits of the label. After this preliminary analysis the SCT carries out an environmental audit at the company’s premises to evaluate information supplied in a questionnaire the company will have been asked to complete which describes the characteristics of the product. Then the label is granted and the product / company is given a final evaluation report.
To date there have been 40 companies involved in the project of which 25 have at least one product certified. A total of 50 products have been granted the Casa Toscana / Green Home label. However, it has been noticeable in the two years of the project’s lifespan that there has been an increase in local companies interested in and attentive to, the environmental consequences of their activity. This is evinced by an increase in the number of requests for certification submitted to the STC and by the use of the label logo on websites / catalogues. One indice of the projects success might be discerned in the fact that a company called Fattorini at the start of the Casa Toscana project had only 10% of its production made of ‘eco-products’. Now the ‘eco-products’ amount to 100% of production and the number of employees has risen from 4-13 in this period.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle that the project had to contend with was the scale of the companies involved. Very small companies are not used to thinking long-term. The environmental audit in such companies and the information retrieval needed of the company’s resources (lighting, energy, water consumption, etc.) created delays often because of a simple lack of computerisation.
To date, formal metrics have not been applied for measuring the results of Green Home and benefits of certified products, except for the companies own reports and evaluations. This is being remedied by the creation of a questionnaire addressed to companies with at least one certified product. The questionnaire has to be completed one year after certification with information about sales of the product, consumer satisfaction and client evaluation.
The project can be considered good practice because of the added value involved in creating certified products which enjoy a price premium in the market place. In addition, the audit carried out within the company (especially if they are small) is very useful as a device for obtaining important information on production levels / data.
The cost of the project was roughly 300,000 euros for the period 2000-04 and it was sponsored by the Regione Toscana and private funds. The Casa Toscana label has been, and still is, one of the key products of CSM because of its strategic weight even within Regional Government polices.
For more information please contact Irene Burroni (irene.csm@editnet.it)
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