Sustainability standards and certification

Sustainability standards and certifications are voluntary, usually third party-assessed, norms and standards relating to environmental, social, ethical and food safety issues, adopted by companies to demonstrate the performance of their organizations or products in specific areas. There are perhaps up to 500 such standards and the pace of introduction has increased in the last decade. The trend started in the late 1980s and 90s with the introduction of Ecolabels and standards for Organic food and other products. In recent years, numerous standards have been established and adopted in the food industry in particular. Most of them refer to the triple bottom line of environmental quality, social equity, and economic prosperity. A standard is normally developed by a broad range of stakeholders and experts in a particular sector and includes a set of practices or criteria for how a crop should be sustainable grown or a resource should be ethically harvested. This might cover, for instance, responsible fishing practices that don't endanger marine biodiversity, or respect for human rights and the payment of fair wages on a coffee or tea plantation. Normally sustainability standards are accompanied by a verification process - often referred to as "certification" - to evaluate that an enterprise complies with a standard, as well as a traceability process for certified products to be sold along the supply chain, often resulting in a consumer-facing label. Certification programmes also focus on capacity building and working with partners and other organisations to support smallholders or disadvantaged producers to make the social and environmental improvements needed to meet the standard.

The basic premise of sustainability standards is twofold. Firstly, they emerged in areas where national and global legislation was weak but where the consumer and NGO movements around the globe demanded action. For example, campaigns by Global Exchange and other NGOs against the purchase of goods from “sweatshop” factories by the likes of Nike, Inc., Levi Strauss & Co. and other leading brands led to the emergence of social welfare standards like the SA8000 and others. Secondly, leading brands selling to both consumers and to the B2B supply chain may wish to demonstrate the environmental or organic merits of their products, which has led to the emergence of hundreds of ecolabels, organic and other standards. A leading example of a consumer standard is the Fairtrade movement, administered by FLO International and exhibiting huge sales growth around the world for ethically sourced produce. An example of a B2B standard which has grown tremendously in the last few years is the Forest Stewardship Council’s standard (FSC) for forest products made from sustainable harvested trees.

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