Home Depot Rolls Out Green Labeling

EcoLogo products are being prominently displayed at the ends of aisles in Home Depot stores; signs throughout the store point customers towards environmentally preferable products.

The building-products retailing giant Home Depot launched a labeling initiative in April 2007, called EcoOptions, to identity environmentally preferable products in all of its U.S. stores. The program identifies more than 2,500 products as having better environmental performance than other products in their class. Large signs in store aisles point the way to these products, which are marked with tags describing their environmental benefits in one of five categories: sustainable forestry, energy efficiency, healthy home, clean air, and water conservation. To qualify for the EcoOptions label, a product must meet recognized labeling standards, such as by those Energy Star or the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), or it must go through an examination of its environmental claims by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS).

According to Chet Chaffee, vice president of environmental programs at SCS, his company has been working with Home Depot since 1992 to verify environmental claims, starting with certified wood (see EBN Vol. 2, No. 4). “It’s not like they come new to this,” he said. “They’ve just been doing most of it internally. [Now] they’re externalizing all that work of the last 15 years.” Chaffee said that SCS’s role in the new program expands on its previous technical advisory work: “They send us vendors that don’t fit the five categories or where the claims don’t fit into accepted standards,” he told EBN. According to Chaffee, SCS will investigate manufacturers’ environmental claims to recommend whether a product is suitable for the EcoOptions label; Home Depot will make the final decision.

Tony Wilbert, public relations manager for environmental programs at Home Depot, said that the company is also working with manufacturers directly to encourage more environmentally friendly products: “We’ve told them that if there are two manufacturers, and one is green, and the price is pretty similar, we’ll choose the green product,” he said. According to Wilbert, Home Depot is already the largest purchaser of FSC-certified wood in the U.S. and hopes to use its purchasing power in other areas as well, with plans to include at least 6,000 products in EcoOptions, accounting for $2.7 billion in sales, about 3% of the store’s annual sales of $90.8 billion.

Wilbert admits that getting consumers to buy EcoOptions products may be a challenge. Citing compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) as an example, he said that “price is the first hurdle” when customers are used to paying much less for an incandescent lamp. Home Depot now lists the potential lifetime savings on the packages of its own brand of CFLs, N:Vision. Wilbert noted that the primary goal of the EcoOptions program is to educate consumers about their choices. “We want the consumer to be able to walk in the door and have options for saving energy” and make other environmentally conscious choices, he said.

– Allyson Wendt

For more information:

The Home Depot
Vinings, Georgia
www.homedepot.com/ecooptions/

May 1, 2007

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