Currently, UL Environment offers two principal environmental services for environmentally sustainable product manufacturers as well as consulting and training.
 
Environmental Claims Validation™. This service provides validation of environmental product claims by means of independent testing and assessments.

Sustainable Product Certification™. This service certifies whether products meet environmentally sustainable product standards.

Training. A variety of training courses will be developed and offered through UL Environment. Example courses will cover topics such as defining green products, greenwashing, and the benefits of third-party certification.

Advisory Services. If manufacturers need help in developing or refining strategies for environmental programs for products and services, they may work with members of our global team.

Through this experience, UL Environment not only provides you with the efficiency of working with a single global partner who can offer multiple validations and certifications, but also can offer you trusted guidance at every step of the process.

As demand for environmentally sustainable products has grown, so has the need to have manufacturers' environmental claims validated and, when possible, certified to sustainability product standards. UL Environment was launched in response to this need. Learn more.

* Accountability and Consumers International. What Assures Consumers on Climate Change? (2007)

UL Environment's Environmental Claims Validation service covers a wide range of environmental claims made by manufacturers related to product attributes, such as energy efficiency, recycled content and volatile organic compound emissions and content, to name a few. Products with validated claims will be included in our Database of Validated and Certified Products and may carry the Environmental Claims Validated logo on their marketing materials and packaging.

The Sustainable Product Certification service will certify products, processes or materials to industry-accepted environmental standards, such as ones being developed by UL Environment and industry groups. When their products are certified, manufacturers will be able to use the Sustainable Product Certification Mark per terms of the standard of reference.

Here's a partial (and growing) list:

• Recycled content 
• Rapidly renewable materials 
• Regional materials 
• Volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions 
• Volatile organic compound (VOC) content 
• Energy efficiency 
• Water efficiency 
• Hazardous or toxic substances 
• Reclamation program 
• Mold resistance 
• Manufacturing energy audits 
• Degradability
• Compostability

Here is how projects flow.

Here's a partial (and growing) list:

• Carpeting
• Office furniture
• Information technology equipment
• Others to follow

A critical component of UL Environment is the Database of Validated and Certified Products. This online tool, designed for both industry professionals as well as consumers, allows users to quickly sort and identify products by product category, company name, product name or type of claim.

To be included in this database, a product must have been validated through Environmental Claims Validation or certified through Sustainable Product Certification. With significant planned industry outreach and the strength of the UL brand, we believe that the Database of UL Environment Validated and Certified Products will quickly become a critical resource for the green building industry.

UL's mission is to work for a safer world, and we believe that sustainability is a global safety issue. In the course of validating product-level environmental claims and developing multi-attribute product level sustainability standards, UL Environment considered the question: "Can an unsustainable business create sustainable products and vice versa?" Our answer is no, but we also realize that responses to the question of "what does a sustainable company look like" varies depending on who you ask. Our work on corporate-level sustainability standards - with scientists, sustainability practitioners and thought leaders in the field of sustainability - is an effort to clarify the vision of a sustainability company while helping companies tell their sustainability story now. UL is also helping companies meet stakeholder skepticism that all sustainability claims are "greenwashing" by clarifying what we mean by the term and by bringing trusted third-party auditing of corporate-level claims to the market.

ULE 880: Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations is an organizational sustainability standard that is being developed jointly by UL Environment and GreenBiz Group, a leading source for news, best practices and research related to the greening of mainstream business. The ISR - Interim Sustainability Requirements - are the interim requirements that will be used in the pilot in anticipation of finalizing and publishing the standard later in 2011.

Companies interested in becoming a pilot should contact Craig Coulter at craig.coulter@ulenvironment.com. Companies engaged as pilots will work with the UL Environment audit team to identify the scope of the engagement, identify and provide data and other evidence in support of the audit review and support the on-site assessment work and follow up certification activities that will result in certified aggregate, domain level, and indicator-by-indicator scores.

The duration of the pilots are expected to run between two to five months. The variance will depend on factors such as the extent to which pilot companies have consolidated systems or readily accessible repositories for all of the information required to conform to the standard, the availability of staff charged with stewarding the process within the pilot companies, and the extent of follow-up interviews and additional research required to verify the information provided by the pilot company.

Companies are largely self-selecting. We are seeking to pilot with medium and large sized manufacturing firms that are interested in partnering with UL Environment to implement the requirements. Companies interested in becoming a pilot should contact Craig Coulter at craig.coulter@ulenvironment.com.