PROJECT DESCRIPTION
BACKGROUND
Limited uptake of greener products can be caused by misleading communication of environmental performance, including greenwashing. This has two main aspects: (i) companies increasingly make green claims in their advertising, but often do so in a misleading way; (ii) consumers consequently believe that such claims are not reliable and, as a result, choose not to purchase greener products.
The Product Environmental Footprint (PEF) is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based method recommended by the EC (Recommendation 2021/2279) for measuring the environmental performance of products (goods and services for different sectors). The overarching purpose of this voluntary instrument is to allow companies to reduce the environmental impacts generated across the value chain of goods and services they produce (from extraction of raw materials, through production and use to final waste management).
The PEF approach is anchored in the wider context of European Green Deal, which states that “Companies making ‘green claims’ should substantiate these against a standard methodology to assess their impact on the environment”, the Circular Economy Action Plan, and relating policy initiatives such as the proposal for regulation on Eco-design for Sustainable Product and the proposal for Green Claims Directive.
The first version of the PEF methodological guidance was provided by the EC in 2013 and tested between 2013-2018, together with more than 280 volunteering companies and organisations, in the so-called Pilot Phase. As a result, different Product Environmental Footprint Category Rules (PEFCR) have been developed and can be used by companies to assess and communicate environmental burdens and impacts associated to the life cycle of products belonging to those specific product categories. Subsequently, the Commission moved to its Transition Phase, aimed at monitoring the use of existing PEFCRs, developing new ones, and promoting a coherent policy implementation of the PEF method. At the end of May 2018, an Italian national law established the Made Green in Italy (MGI) scheme, an environmental evaluation and communication scheme based on PEF, the first legislative act to introduce the PEF method in a Member State. The aim is for PEF to become a common methodology for Italian products to show their environmental footprints and to tackle the problem of credibility of green claims.
OBJECTIVES
The LIFE MAGIS project, by targeting both consumers and producers, aimed to support the launch and spread of the PEF method and of the PEF-based Made Green in Italy scheme, by stimulating PEF-related innovation, improving communication about green products, and incentivising consumers to purchase greener products. To do this, LIFE MAGIS was to develop new Italian product category rules for the carrying out of PEF studies (PEFCRs) on certain food products (onion of Medicina, sheep hard cheese, ice cream, coffee, non-puff pastries, and Italian seasonal leavened cakes,), leather products, and window fittings.
The project also:
- helped define PEFCRs at the EU level through its work on new product groups at national level;
- demonstrated the effectiveness of the PEF method in promoting sustainable models of production and consumption;
- encouraged better-informed and conscious consumer choices and ensure the transparency and comparability of environmental information;
- created tools and approaches to make PEF easily replicable and transferable to other Member States.
RESULTS
The project reached its objective to support the launch and diffusion of the PEF in Italy and the PEF-based Made Green in Italy scheme, especially among trade associations and federations. By the project end and thanks to the support of its partners, two of the MGI Product Category Rules (PCRs) developed by the project (for ice cream and sheep hard cheese) were submitted to the Italian Ministry of Environment in order to be used in the actual scheme. The PCRs for ice cream are already valid while the sheep hard cheese one were submitted to the Ministry's approval after project end. The approach was also transferred to the onion of Medicina category. In addition the work done was transferred to other product categories, kiwis and pears, and their PCRs are now valid. Support was also provided by partners to associations from the confectionery, forage and cured meat sectors to understand the requirements to apply for a MGI label.
The project achieved most of its expected results and the following are worth mentioning:
- 7 new PEFCRs proposals at national level, related to product groups, not previously considered by the EC PEF pilots, were defined as well as 8 new MGI PCRs.
- 21 pilot companies were involved in the implementation of PEFs for a series of products, an exercise which resulted in 26 PEF studies, 24 Improvement plans and 27 Environmental Product Footprint Declarations (EPDs).
- 6 new PEF-compliant datasets related to the product groups involved in the project were developed and made available;
- The effectiveness of the PEF method was partially demonstrated with the improvement measures implemented by the 21 companies. As a result, the environmental footprint of the involved products was reduced by at least 2% in the different impact categories measured by the PEF study;
- Guidelines for the verification and validation process of the PEFCRs as well as a document with recommendations on how to improve the processes were produced and shared with the Italian Ministry of Environment and ACCREDIA (Italian Accreditation Body).
