Sustainable Product Campaign Workshop

Present: Daniel Swartz (Humusz, Hungary), Darek Szwed (Green Federation,Poland), Corn van Dooren, Monique Wijn (AKB, Holland), Ewa Charkiewicz (ANPED WG-CAP), Sascha Kranendonk (WI - Germany), partly present: Claire F lenly (WEN, UK) Absent: Helena Panina (Mama '86, Ukraine) because of visa problems;) and Steve Graham (Aedenat, Spain) busy preparing 'The Other European Summit'.

Several observers: i.e. from Slowenia and Macedonia, Actie Strohalm, Peace Corps made useful comments and suggestions.

The aim of the workshop 'Sustainable Product Campaign' (SPC) was to discuss the product choice and the organizational set up of the campaign. The first substantial batch of funding has been granted by EC. The campaign will start as of 1February 1996.

About the campaign

This campaign has been set up by the secretariat of ANPED WG CAP in cooperation with the following partners: Alternative Consumer Organization, Netherlands, AEDENAT, Spain; Women's Environmental Network, UK; Waste Reduction Alliance; 'HUMUSZ', Hungary; Gr een Federation, Krakow, Poland. Organizations in other countries expressed their interest to join this campaign. The scientific and international coordination will be carried out from Wuppertal Institute in cooperation with the secretariat of ANPED WG CAP.

The campaign will focus on 2 - 3 selected every day products. The aim is to stimulate a shift in the consumer attitudes by providing them with the information about environmental and social cradle to grave impacts of products. In order to enable the chang e in the purchase decisions the consumers will be provided with information on other environmentally sound product options and alternative life styles.

The stories of the products will also provide a starting point for organizing a dialogue (a national roundtable) among different stakeholders (citizens' organizations, representatives of producers and retailers, government agencies). At the roundtable a balanced group of participants will identify measures towards the necessary policy change to enable consumer choice and green the economy (eg. ecological tax and subsidy reform, increased producer responsibility). The mutual understanding created during the roundtable should lead to the creation of a national network or an alliance for promoting sustainable consumption.

The campaign should result in the recognition of the campaign workshop participants and the broader public that the shift to sustainable products needs more that just technological fixes: it requires a joint effort of all social sectors to adapt our value s, institutions, legislation, and infrastructures to allow the shift to sustainable consumption and production.

An evaluation workshop at the end of the pilot stage of the project (18 months) will assess the success of the Sustainable Product Campaign in pilot countries and improvements.

The main focus of the discussion was on:

1.) achieving good understanding of each others backgrounds, approaches, country specific situations;

2.) on the criteria for the selection of products or product groups for the campaign.

Because of the cultural, political and economical differences in each of the countries the development of common understanding and consensus in the choice of products is crucial to the success of this pan-european campaign.

An agreement has been reached that we want to choose products which have a larger share of the market and significant position in every day shopping. Soft drinks and detergents have been identified by the present participants as useful product categories for the campaign. This choice has however to be consulted with coordinators from Spain and Ukraine who could not take part in the meeting.

. The importance of bringing out environmental as well as social cradle to grave impacts of products, from extraction of resources, through transport, production process, and disposal of waste has been agreed upon. In practice it means the stories of produ cts will have to show eg. the impacts on water, on biodiversity, as well as on quality of life, eg. on health, on jobs. This part of discussion was guided by the matrix for product choice prepared for the meeting by Sacha Kranendonk. It has also been poi nted out that the impacts of commercial advertising have to be made visible in the dossiers or the life cycle stories of products we want to present to consumers and decision makers.

We also want to show the alternatives: different, greener products, a shift from product to service or no product or service at all. This is about changing consumption patterns from the individual point of view.

But since we want to have a supportive framework for these individual lifestyle change, there needs to be change for greener products to survive in the market. Therefore, we also need legislative goals: for example push for more concrete laws on "the righ t to know", "freedom of information","Eco-auditing", "disclosure", "producer liability" etc. Most of these laws are first discussed at the European level and only then become national law. Directives on these type of issues are long before hand prepared a t the EC-Commission, and we should take influence on this process jointly, that is the added value of working together on such a campaign.