Sustainability certifications - are they worth the hype?

We are living in the golden age of certified products, ensuring us of containing sustainable raw materials, and being produced with respect to the environment by fairly paid workers in a safe environment.

According to the?International Institute for Sustainable Development, there are more than 400 voluntary sustainability standards operating around the globe.?That is plenty to choose from even if not all of them apply to every industry. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the sheer amount of certificates and the varying standards can be overwhelming for consumers and companies alike.

However, certificates are great and necessary as they ensure that companies don’t make up their sustainability claims from thin air. However, in some cases, they can enable greenwashing.

So, let’s jump into the rabbit hole of sustainability certifications and see if they are worth the hype!

Why are certificates important?

Sustainability certificates were made necessary due to the lack of regulation over certain sustainability buzzwords. Any company could use fluffy statements for their products such as “green”, “clean”, or “sustainable” as these claims were or are not regulated but sound convincing from a marketing perspective. Besides, it's a great way to measure where the company stands in terms of environmental, social, and ethical practices and there is space for development. For an organization truly committed to doing better in these spheres, these certifications can be tremendously useful tools.

The Downsize

The most obvious problem with certificates is that they are voluntary.

They were born out of market needs and lack of government regulation, created by NGOs and business consortiums. Therefore, in a lot of cases, they function as businesses which means that their standards and prices vary greatly. This can be misleading for the consumer and challenging for companies seeking to achieve certification.

A certifying agency can establish any standard which sometimes doesn’t rely on anything more than self-assessment like in the case of the?PETA-approved Vegan certificate. This is not only a problem because it gives an opportunity to less-ethical business owners for greenwashing but also because if consumers are not familiar with the requirements of certain certificates, they might get confused or misled. For example, the widely used cruelty-free Leaping Bunny certificate on personal care products certifies that a product was not tested on animals, but it doesn’t verify if it is vegan which for most consumers also falls under the term of cruelty-free.?Another example of potentially misleading certificates is Carbon Neutral certifications. Being certified carbon neutral does not mean that a company does not produce CO2. It means that they pay off their emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.

The problem with this? They don’t treat the root of the issue, rather allowing the emissions to continue while it’s hard to follow where the investment ends up. Moreover, many small and medium-sized companies cannot afford to pay the hefty sums the certification process requires sometimes they need to repeat on a yearly basis.

What about Leap's certificates?

As a product intended to provide an alternative to animal and faux leather, there is an obvious need for certifications proving our sustainability claims. At the moment, we're planning to execute the LCA to provide sufficient data on our emissions and various use cases of Leap.

Currently, we are in the process of achieving Leap's first two certificates: one proving the bio-based content of Leap, and one proving that the material is 100% animal-free. The composition certificate is important for us because it keeps us accountable and highlights Leap's biggest strength, its 89% bio-based content.

Of course, we're not stopping here. Our long-term plans include achieving a Cradle-to-Cradle certification because we don’t only want to produce waste-based, upcycled material. We want it to slip back into nature with as little trace as possible.

Moreover, we aspire to become a B-Corp certified company as it is not only Leap’s sustainability credentials that we focus on but also inclusion, independence, and credibility through the entirety of Beyond Leather Materials.