What is the Global Clean Economy?

In merchandising, psychology matters a great deal. Consider the humble 99p/99c price label, perhaps the single greatest merchandising trick of all time. It works, not because consumers get a genuine discount, but because they think they’re receiving a discount, when in fact the saving is absurdly negligible.

In this exact guise, there’s a new merchandising trickster on the horizon. Soon a tsunami of ‘net-zero’ or ‘carbon neutral’ products and services will flood our supermarket shelves and online stores, exploiting a relatively new but growing consumer psychological need: the need to live in harmony with the natural world.

Whilst many of these products may be produced sustainably, a significant proportion of them will not be truly net-zero, despite claiming to be so. Adverts from companies across aviation, energy, automotive, and even plant-based dairy alternatives, have already been banned for making misleading environmental claims.

Global initiatives are already underway to try to bring integrity to the climate claims that companies make; particularly in regards to their use of energy and carbon credits. Future regulation may prevent many of these bad actors from exploiting consumer demand for green alternatives, but that demand will only continue to grow globally. The key question is: how can companies with the right environmental approach, who have genuinely implemented sustainable production methods powered by renewables, prove their product is ‘net-zero’? Trust will be crucial in the clean economy of the future.

The solution, we believe, lies in methods and systems that we helped design over 20 years ago. The first part of this was the EU’s Guarantee of Origin, a certification scheme that assures consumers that the electricity they purchase is renewable. Building from this knowledge, we helped create I-RECs, which have since become the global standard for tracking sustainably produced electricity. Evident is now focused on scaling attribute certificates beyond renewables.

With new certification standards for hydrogen, low-methane natural gas, carbon removals, and a range of other products being developed - to name a few of the initiatives that will become essential for our future - Evident will pave the way to a global clean economy underpinned by certification, built on trust.

Developing a robust global system of this scale, will of course take time. And it remains to be seen whether highly complex products, such as an automobiles, which have an average of between 15,000 and 25,000 individual components, will ever be capable of complete, end-to-end attribute tracking. Evident remains hopeful and committed to enabling this. The immutable characteristics of both energy and raw materials mean this is a possibility, no matter how long the supply chain.

We see a future where companies can prove their products are net-zero with certificates that document the sustainable nature of all source material, energy inputs, and production processes. We call it the global clean economy. And when this clean revolution arrives, it will be certified. No more smoke. No more mirrors.