Providing reliable and understandable information on the environmental performance of products and services is a necessary action to support the consumers’ purchasing decisions and guide them towards more sustainable purchasing choices.
This need arises to allow the effective and wide dissemination of truly “green” products in the market, ensuring that the consumer can recognize and reward them. For individual choices to converge towards products that are resource-efficient and not harmful to the natural environment and human health, the right way could be to provide the relevant information, for example, using data derived from studies of life cycle assessment (LCA) in the form of impact indicators.
However, large and complex data can overload consumers. Therefore, we need to understand if and how the complexity of communicating environmental information for products and services can be simplified.
The team working on Life Effige project developed guidelines to provide support for environmental product communication and green marketing initiatives. The document starts with an overview regarding the consumer’s perspective and their growing environmental awareness, and then goes on to illustrate the principles to be respected for environmental communication, also providing several concrete examples of communication traced on the web. The document closes with a brief description of the main methods for carrying out LCA studies, which indicators to choose for consumer communication and how to make them more understandable through the use of conversion factors and equivalences that are intuitive and closer to people’s daily lives.
Click on the following link to download the document.