As a crucial part of his ambitious goal to turn the federal government into a leader in green practices, President Obama has turned to an unexpected resource to help drive the effort: the government’s purchasing and property arm, the General Services Administration.

Staples Advantage, the business-to-business division of Staples Inc., has expanded its Sustainable Earth line with eco-friendly kitchen, breakroom and janitorial products, the majority of them certified for compostability or recycled content.

WWF [has] launched a global benchmarking tool for pulp and paper products at PaperWorld in Frankfurt, Germany. Check Your Paper is an online database to help paper buyers find products with the lowest environmental impact.

The tool rates the environmental quality of the paper-making process for a given product, including how well forests supplying fibre are managed, use of recycled fibre, fossil CO2 emissions, waste going to landfills and water pollution from mills. The fibre in all papers featured on the audited list on the website must come from known, legal sources. Paper products posted on the official list have been audited by third-party certification bodies to ensure high credibility.

Check Your Paper at the same time allows pulp and paper manufacturers to voluntarily rate and post their products’ environmental impacts online.

Makers of paper products including Arjo Wiggins, ITC Limited Paper Boards and Specialty Papers Division, Mondi, M-real, Lenzing Papier, SCA, Steinbeis Papier, Tullis Russell, and UPM are the first to disclose their selected papers’ environmental profile at http://checkyourpaper.panda.org.

As of today, the Check Your Paper includes about 100 paper products with “good” or “excellent” environmental score listed in the coated and uncoated categories, such as copy papers and printing and writing papers.

WWF invites other pulp and paper manufacturers to follow the example of these companies by communicating their products’ environmental performance transparently. “We believe this new database will help paper buyers choose the most environmentally friendly papers on the market. WWF invites all paper buyers to check the tool before purchasing and encourage other paper-makers to join Check Your Paper,” says Rodney Taylor, Forest Director, WWF International.

“Listing our products in Check Your Paper is an important step in our commitment to augmenting economic, environmental and societal capital and in making environmentally responsible products available to our customers and paper buyers.” says P.N. Sridharr, ITC Limited, Paper Boards and Specialty Papers Division, India, one of the manufacturers that have posted their papers’ environmental information on the database.

“Over the years SCA has been deeply involved in the development of publication papers with high environmental performance – TCF bleaching, FSC certification, good resource utilisation, small carbon footprint. It is very positive that paper customers now get access to an easy-to-use tool to guide them in their choice of an environmental-friendly paper, says Björn Lyngfelt, vice president communications SCA Forest Products, Sweden.

Check Your Paper includes all the main pulp and paper categories, including coated and uncoated papers, newsprint, tissue, packaging and board papers, speciality papers and several types of pulp.

Globally, paper consumption is on the rise, with an expected increase from the current rate of 400 million tons annually to 450-500 million tons by 2020. Without a higher standard of environmental performance across the industry, this level of consumption will leave an unacceptably large environmental impact on the planet. Poor practices such as reckless logging and indiscriminate expansion of pulpwood plantations damage fragile ecosystems and escalate social conflict. The pulp and paper industry’s mills and factories are large users of energy and emitters of greenhouse gases, and many are also significant sources of water pollution and landfill waste.

Check Your Paper provides a single percentage score for a product that indicates the quality of its production in terms of reduced environmental impact. In addition, the star-rating breaks this down into impact mitigation performance specific to forests, climate change and aquatic ecosystems.

In order to earn the maximum five stars in WWF’s Check Your Paper, the paper product shall have:

• positive impacts on forests, and contain high proportions of post-consumer recycled fibre and/or virgin fibre originating from credibly certified, well managed forests.
• reduced contributions to climate change through use of recycled fibre, responsible forest management and minimising CO2 emissions from fossil fuels in the manufacturing process, and, indirectly, emissions of CO2 and methane from degrading waste in landfills.
• close to zero water pollution through reduction of organic water pollution and reduced water pollution from bleaching, through promotion of unbleached or totally chlorine-free bleached products.

Honda Motor Co. will start evaluating all of its suppliers on their environmental aspects under the newest revision of its Green Purchasing Guidelines.

Representatives of the West Coast States Environmental Preferable Purchasing Collaborative will talk about how states are encouraging green products in state procurement solicitations.

Presenters:  Alicia Culver, Responsible Purchasing Network (RPN); Joshua Saunders, GoodGuide, Karin Kraft, Washington Department of Ecology

Title: Advanced Green Purchasing Through the Use of Trusted Ecolabels
Date: Thursday, January 20, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM PST

Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/977868962.

Nearly 18 months after opening up the EPEAT certification to the entire world, the Green Electronics Council has appointed six organizations as certified qualifying bodies, allowing for even further expansion of the green IT label.

The six groups, all of which are certification, labeling and testing bodies, are based in the United States, China, Taiwan and Germany, and will serve to bring more products more quickly into the EPEAT registry, as well as get products currently certified in one country accepted into other country-specific EPEAT databases.

In reaction to multi-state restrictions, dish detergent makers have done away with the ‘magic’ ingredient that gives dishes that spot-free sparkle: Phosphates. But not everyone is so happy about it.

In a world of rapidly expanding regulations, including Europe’s REACH and RoHS, companies need an effective way to work with their supply chains to collect, track and analyze a vast amount of data. Among other things, companies must determine which materials or parts can be used in production and report regularly to customers, stakeholders and authorities on a growing number of metrics. If not properly managed, companies risk severe consequences, including lost revenue or markets, increased compliance costs and greater risk of wasted inventory and supply-chain disruption.

The good news: Companies can overcome these challenges. In this webcast, learn how manufacturers are developing and executing compliance strategies to help them gain competitive advantage while minimizing costs and risks.

Join Marc Gunther, Senior Writer at GreenBiz.com, in a conversation with Joel Eurich, Director, Global Environmental, Health and Safety, Molex; Joe Stainbrook, Senior Product Environmental Engineer, Molex; Kim Knickle, Practice Director, Emerging Agenda, Sustainability, IDC; and Jennifer Scholze, Senior Director, Sustainability Solution Marketing, Product Safety and Stewardship, SAP. The conversation will focus on how companies are mitigating product compliance risks and driving business benefits by deploying an integrated product compliance solution.

• Gain math and science skills while determining ways to reduce the carbon footprint of shipping blue jeans,
• Engage in civic discourse during a discussion of how we dispose of our waste,
• Develop corporate policies to protect workers and consumers, and
• Gain media literacy skills while analyzing ads.

This resource, available from Face the Future at no charge, includes a series of ten fully-planned lessons designed for grades 9-12 which will lead your students through an exploration of the production and consumption of goods – a system called the materials economy. Students critically analyze the sustainability of the steps of this system, determining how consumption can benefit people, economies, and environments.

Free webinar

Want to learn more about Buy, Use, Toss? Attend an online professional development workshop – no travel, no costs! Facing the Future will be hosting a live webinar about Buy, Use, Toss? on Wednesday September 29 at 3:00 pm PST. During this 45 minute web seminar, we will explore the 10 lessons in the curriculum unit, learn about its development, and hear how educators have used it to engage their students. Register for the webinar at https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/520262465.

From a World Resources Institute Announcement:

Ecolabelindex.com allows consumers and companies to compare green certifications side-by-side.

As consumers and companies become increasingly aware of their environmental impact, a surge of ecolabels have flooded the marketplace. Today, hundreds of ecolabels worldwide compete to tell us which products are best for the planet. These colorful stamps on labels declare products to be “carbon neutral”, “forest safe”, “fairly traded”, or any number of standards of sustainability. But in the self-regulated ecocertification industry, how can consumers and institutional buyers really know what these stamps of approval mean?

The database contains info about 327 ecolabels in 114 countries, and 40 industry sectors.

Report and Database

Enter the 2010 Global Ecolabel Monitor – a collaboration between the World Resources Institute and ecolabelling.org founders Big Room Inc. that gives a behind-the-scenes look at how different ecolabels certify their products.

Access ecolabelindex.com Database

+ Alphabetical List (327 Labels)

+ Only Show Labels By Region

+ Only Show Labels by Industry

Note: Labels Can Be Combined

See Also: Examples of Labels Being Used in U.S. (via Washington Post)