The objective of this project is to evaluate the environmental benefits that can be attributed to the environmental protection products (“green products”) in Taiwan, and use these results to inform the public of the effectiveness of implementing the Green Mark Ecolabeling Program and relevant green consumption and green procurement policies and measures. This information can also be used by the operator of the Green Mark program and participants of green purchasing activities to improve their operations and purchasing practices. In order to achieve the above objective, this project reviewed the nine environmental performance indicators used in the Fiscal Year 2015 project, and replaced one of the indicators, the Hazardous Waste Reduction indicator with the Other Indirect Benefits indicator, so as to expand the aspects of environmental benefits covered by this project. This project adopted 4 principles in selecting 50 product criteria and 100 green products for evaluations of their environmental benefits. The 4 principles are: greatly different product characteristics, availability of product’s actual measurement data, different product manufacturers, and manufacturers using a great number of Green Mark ecolabels. Actual environmental benefits resulting from implementing green purchasing measures were then calculated based on the 2015 data for total numbers/quantities of Green Mark products purchased, green products purchased by government agencies, green products purchased by the private sector, and green products sold. For the purpose of understanding the potential scope of green products’ environmental and economic benefits, this project also collected data on the annual domestic market of 50 products, and compared the data with the annual production of Green Mark products. Information resulted from this exercise can be used to estimate the market share of Green Mark products, as well as the theoretical maximal value of Green Mark Program’s economic benefits. Regarding the collection of information related to evaluations of environmental benefits conducted by foreign ecolabeling programs, this project has contacted the five ecolabeling programs which have conducted such activities in the past through the annual surveys conducted by the Global Ecolabeling Network (GEN). During the annual general meeting of GEN, the project personnel also conducted interviews with representatives of other programs. The finding of such investigations is that the Green Mark Program is well ahead of most ecolabeling programs in the area of evaluating green products’ environmental benefits. Calculations of green products’ economic and environmental benefits conducted by this project show that in 2015, the implementation of the 50 Green Mark product items calculated resulted in savings of 190,000,000 kWh electricity, 4,580,000 tonnes water, 46,810,000 liters oil, and 780,000 tonnes reduced CO2 emissions, and achieved an overall economic saving of $1.7 billion New Taiwan dollars.

Ecolabelling, Green Product, Environment Benefit