If you deal with green or sustainable products, how would you like a simpler way to cut through the greenwash and confusion to get your job done faster and more effectively? For anyone who makes, sells, or purchases green cleaning products, ISSA now offers the much anticipated Transpare, an online registry that promises to do just that!
Ten years ago, having your product certified by a major ecolabel organization was sufficient to compete in the green marketplace. But today’s green marketplace is substantially different than it was a decade ago. Today, there are more than 3,000 certified green products in the market, and the number continues to grow. This dramatic increase makes it increasingly difficult for manufacturers to differentiate their green products, and makes it a challenge for purchasers to identify and select those green cleaning products that best meet their sustainability goals.
On top of this, institutional and commercial organizations are demanding greater product information as a condition of purchasing products, but they are frustrated by the lack of credible detailed information about the environmental health and safety attributes of cleaning products. This situation is exacerbated by the fact that a growing number of purchasing organizations are embracing sustainability and environmental initiatives, which, in turn, they use to position themselves in the marketplace as environmental leaders. And in this age of instant information, many are wondering why the environmental profiles of cleaning products are not more readily available.
It was out of these changing market conditions that ISSA, with partner Ecoform, decided to develop Transpare.
Transpare is a Web-based product registry that provides specific information about the key environmental, health, and safety attributes of cleaning products to commercial and institutional purchasers. It was designed by ISSA and Ecoform, the leading technical analysis company that focuses on environmental performance of companies and their products, to meet the needs of the evolving green marketplace by providing a way for manufacturers to differentiate their products from the thousands of other green products in the industry. At the same time, Transpare provides institutional organizations and other prospective purchasers of cleaning products with pertinent, easy-to-use data so that buyers can be sure the products they’re buying and using are suitable for facility occupants.
It’s Not Another Standard
The obvious question at this point is ‘Why do we need another green standard?’ The answer is quite simple really: We don’t. Programs such as Green Seal, Ecologo, and Design for the Environment have already done an excellent job in defining what a green cleaning product is. Transpare is significantly different from the traditional eco-labels. Transpare is designed to operate as a tool for communicating information to institutional and commercial purchasers. It is not a standard that defines green. Transpare doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel by offering yet another standard. In fact, Transpare isn’t a standard at all. Transpare is a tool for finding specific information on the environmental profile of a product. It allows institutional purchasers to see exactly what it is that makes a product green and how green it is, and helps them to find products that meet the specific needs of their facility occupants. So Transpare actually compliments the existing green standards by providing a way for products to differentiate themselves using hard, credible, and verified data. In fact, representatives from all three of the previously mentioned programs served on the development committee for Transpare. However, while Transpare works with existing standards, it can also be easily used as a stand-alone tool.
In addition to the major ecolabels in our industry, Transpare was developed with the help of a number of purchaser, manufacturer, and nongovernmental organizations. These included organizations such as States of New York and California, Purdue University, Colgate University, the Healthy Schools Campaign, Diversey, Ecolab, and Betco. ISSA brought together this diverse group of organizations to help create a new tool that would meet the needs of all industry segments in the new green marketplace.
One of the features of Transpare that makes it such as fantastic tool for purchasers is the search filter that allows users to easily find products that meet their needs by selecting the criteria they want. They can even go so far as to select specific thresholds for various environmental, health, and safety attributes important to them and their organizations.
For those purchasers who don’t feel comfortable with that level of detail, Transpare also offers preset filters that search the system for products that meet the standards created by other organizations. For example, Transpare opens with a filter for the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Efficient Design for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance (LEED-EBOM) standard ready to find products compliant with the green cleaning section of LEED-EBOM. Transpare has a similar filter for ISSA’s Cleaning Industry Management Standard for Green Buildings (CIMS-GB) certification.
Apples to Apples—or Green to Greener
Of course, what’s a tool with only one feature, right? Transpare also gives users the ability to perform side-by-side comparisons of products and easily see which product best meet their needs. Users also can create an electronic summary of the data for a specific product that can be easily saved to a computer or e-mailed to a colleague. Finally, users can create a login and password for themselves that allows them to save their favorite products and their preferred search filters.
The benefits of Transpare span both ends of the market. First and foremost, of course, is helping commercial facilities select cleaning products that are best suited to protect the environment while still protecting the health and safety of the facility occupants. But Transpare also makes it easier for manufacturers to differentiate their products, and perhaps more importantly, allows purchasers to recognize and reward manufacturers for their innovation and product development along the environmental, health, and safety spectrum. Purchasers can also be recognized for their environmentally friendly purchasing habits by becoming part of the Transpare Informed Purchaser program. Informed Purchasers pledge to use Transpare to select cleaning products where practical. (Transpare has only been developed for chemical cleaners so far, other product categories are coming soon!). To reward Informed Purchasers, Transpare provides them with an Informed Purchaser logo to be used on business cards and organization Web sites as well recognition on the Transpare Web site.
Transpare also offers benefits for the cleaning industry as a whole. It has the potential to reduce, or even eliminate greenwash (aka, market confusion) in the market by creating a uniform language for manufacturers to use when communicating information on the environmental qualities of cleaning products.
Transpare also opens the door for a larger number of products to be recognized for their environmental attributes by keeping the economic barriers to entry for companies to have products listed on Transpare low as well as decreasing the time it takes for a product to be listed. Ultimately, this will lead to an increase in the number of manufacturers and products that can do business in the green marketplace, which in turn, offers a greater number of options to the institutional and commercial facilities who are looking for safe, environmentally preferable products.
To help open the green marketplace to more manufacturers, while still offering purchasers and end customers a reliable source of information, Transpare allows manufacturers to list products under one of two listing tiers. The first tier is what is called the Registered tier. Transpare Registered products have their data subject to an on-going audit process. As part of this on-going audit, products are regularly and randomly selected to have a number of their environmental, health, and safety data points verified. This allows Transpare to ensure the accuracy of the data while minimizing the resources needed for manufacturers to list their products. For those manufacturers who wish to take their transparency and environmental stewardship a step further, Transpare offers its second tier, Transpare Verified. Transpare Verified products have all of their data points preverified as a precondition of listing. Transpare Verified products receive special recognition on the Transpare Web site, and the companies that produce them can make a strong claim of environmental stewardship.
For both Registered and Verified products, Transpare employs a unique online data upload process. Manufacturers can literally sign on to Transpare.com with their unique login and password and upload information about their products to Transpare at their leisure. Of course, all confidential data is protected behind the Ecoform firewall and is only accessible to the Ecoform-trained verifiers performing the actual verification of product data.
ISSA and Ecoform have been promoting the Transpare program as an easy-to-use tool for indentifying environmentally preferable products. In fact, you may have even seen me speak at the Green Schools National Conference in West Palm Beach, FL, this year. You can expect to see more promotion of Transpare at trade shows, industry events, and in various publications, both online and in print. We’re also working with other associations and nongovernmental organizations through our Transpare partner program that helps spread the word about Transpare and the benefits it offers to the cleaning industry.
