Businesses latch on to green credentials
CrestClean’s green credentials are bringing peace of mind to New Zealand businesses striving to reduce their environmental footprint.
The company’s Environmental Choice accreditation for its services and core cleaning products, gained earlier this year, has been a talking point for existing and potential customers, says CrestClean’s National Accounts Manager Sam Creasy.
“Environmental credentials are now a major criteria when it comes to procurement decisions,” he added.
The Government-owned ecolabel Environmental Choice New Zealand provides the strongest environmental guarantee of the well-known ecolabels in New Zealand, a new survey has found.
The ConsumerLink Panel survey asked members of the 120,000 strong Panel to assess Environmental Choice against other prominent ecolabels – FSC, Fairtrade, PEFC, CarboNZero, Energy Star and ecoware.
More than 30 per cent of respondents rated Environmental Choice as providing consumers with the strongest environmental guarantee, with CarboNZero the next highest at 20 percent.
The label also rated highly for trustworthiness (behind Energy Star and Fairtrade), and also polled well for having high standards.
Recognition of the label was just under 70 percent, ahead of all but Energy Star and Fairtrade again, which have a much more public profile.
CrestClean has had its cleaning and specialist services ECNZ approved. “We are the only national cleaning company to have this valuable endorsement,” Sam added.
“With more and more companies looking at ways to reduce their environmental footprint, moving to an ECNZ accredited cleaning company is a simple but significant change.”
To gain the ECNZ label, organisations undergo rigorous multiple-criteria, third-party verification of their products and/or services against environmental standards through the life-cycle of the product/service.
“Crest customers value the fact that we have a third-party accreditation, it shows that we’re willing to be audited on our processes and that we walk the walk,” said Sam.
“A lot of commercial cleaning companies use so called ‘green’ chemicals, but having the actual cleaning service accredited with the processes, all equipment, the training behind it, that’s an extremely difficult box to tick.
“For a company of Crest’s size to be able to keep those high Environmental standards on a national scale speaks to the robustness of our systems and processes.”
The ConsumerLink Panel survey also asked whether the Environmental Choice logo would influence respondents to buy products from the various product ranges licensed by the ecolabel. More than half of the buyers of cleaning products said yes, and the response for DIY products, Hygiene Products, Office Products and Toiletry Products ranged from 47 percent to 49 percent saying yes.
Given a little more information on the Environmental Choice ecolabel and asked if that would change their view on buying a product in those categories with the logo on it, 68-71 percent said yes across the five categories.
Environmental Choice New Zealand General Manager Francesca Lipscombe says the research provided a very useful insight into awareness of the label – and of ecolabels in general.
“While we don’t have the level of consumer penetration some of the other labels have, it’s reassuring to see that there is a good level of recognition of what we stand for, and plenty of evidence that consumers value the reassurance of environmental preferability our label provides.”
