The goal of this project is to assess the actual environmental benefits reaped through promoting the environmental protection products (“green products”) in the Republic of China, and use the assessment results to communicate to the general public the effects and achievements of implementing the Green Mark Program and government green purchasing policies over the years. The outcomes of this project may also be used to provide feedback to the Green Mark Program and various green consumption and purchasing initiatives, and serve as important inputs for future environmental policy review and improvement process. In order to achieve the above goal, the project has chosen to use nine environmental performance indicators in assessing the environmental performance of various green products. These nine indicators were grouped into three categories (low pollution, operation cost saving, and recycled material content), and used to calculate a single environmental benefit score in accordance with the requirements in specific Green Mark product criteria. For the product environmental performance evaluation of the low pollution category, the hazard classifications adopted in the United Nations’ Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS) were used as the basis for defining environmental impacts and assigning specific impact scores. The GHS classifications together with the chemical hazard information from the material safety data sheets (MSDS) of specific chemical substances regulated by the Green Mark product criteria, were then used to calculate the total impact score of each chemical. After summing up the individual impact scores of all chemical substances regulated in a specific Green Mark criteria, the low pollution environmental performance due to implementing the requirement of reducing hazardous substances in the specific Green Mark criteria can be quantified. As for the environmental performance in the operation cost saving, and recycled material content categories, this project referred to the approaches adopted by other green product evaluation systems and ecolabeling schemes. The actual content ratios of recycled materials and the resulting cost savings due to the use of recycled materials were used to calculate the environmental performance of specific green products in both categories. In order for the project results to be used both for achievement communication purpose and as inputs for policy review, the environmental performance statistics of the various green products were integrated with the environmental performance scores calculated in this study. A radar chart was used to demonstrate the comparisons of the product’s environmental performance in the low pollution, operation cost saving, and recycled material content categories and presented the key parts of product environmental benefit information.

Ecolabelling, Green Product, Environment Benefit