MAde Green in Italy Scheme

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.

To tackle these problems, in 2013, the European Commission defined an official method to assess the environmental performance of products: the Product Environmental Footprint (PEF). In 2015, in the EU Action Plan for the Circular Economy (COM(2015) 614 final), the Commission emphasised the need to make green claims more trustworthy through use of the PEF. At the end of May 2018, an Italian national law established the Made Green in Italy scheme, based on the 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, in Italy, the problem of credibility of green claims. It is hoped many companies will take up the Made Green in Italy scheme, prompting investment to make products more environmentally friendly throughout their life cycles.

OBJECTIVES

The LIFE MAGIS project will target consumers and producers to support the launch and spread of the PEF method and of the PEF-based Made Green in Italy scheme. The project will thus stimulate PEF-related innovation, improve communication about green products, and incentivise consumers to purchase greener products. To do this, LIFE MAGIS will develop new Italian product category rules for the carrying out of PEF studies on specific products (PEFCRs). The PEFCRs will cover certain food products (snacks, ice cream, fruit, cheese and coffee), leather products, window fittings and cosmetics.

The project will also:

help define PEFCRs at EU level through its work on new product groups at national level;

demonstrate the effectiveness of the PEF method in promoting sustainable models of production and consumption;

encourage better-informed and conscious consumer choices and ensure the transparency and comparability of environmental information;

create tools and approaches to make PEF easily replicable and transferable to other Member States.

 

RESULTS

Expected results:

21 companies will be trained to apply the PEF method and to test different approaches to environmental footprint communication to consumers;

six new PEFCRs will be drafted for products that are not included in (or did not complete) the PEF methodology development pilot phase;

6 750 companies will be contacted through partner trade associations and made more aware of the PEF method;

the environmental footprint of the pilot products in the different impact categories will be reduced by 2-5 %, by collecting data on both the companies environmental performance and the products life cycle environmental performance;

seven new PEF-compliant datasets related to the product groups covered by the project will be made available to interested companies;

awareness raising campaigns on PEF will reach 800 000 people;

surveys among some 8 000 consumers in five Member States to explore green consumers behaviors and its determinants;

21 new jobs will be created at the pilot plants (among others PEF and MGI experts, green marketing experts, third party verifiers;

training and awareness-raising will be provided to European trade associations, companies and institutions, and to Italian trade associations, companies, and public bodies.