Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
There are increasing levels of independence from commercial influences in the
standard setting and in the product verification from the first to the second and
the third-party systems, but there is nothing in this classification of systems to
infer that a third-party system of compliance assessment necessarily means that
the environmental standard is higher than in a first-party system. Nonetheless, first-
party systems typically set low standards that are easily achieved, and for consumers,
the gradation from first- to third-party schemes broadly infers increasing levels of
sustainability, robustness of compliance assessment and reliability of the product
endorsement as expressed in the product ecolabel or endorsement.
First-party certification systems involve the development of standards and criteria
within a company, with a compliance assessment procedure carried out internally
(such as by a company-appointed assessor). Such internal assessments are typically
carried out to assess compliance to a standard and criteria that have been developed
and internally agreed by the company as being relevant to the needs of an ecolabel
for the products being assessed. Such internal standards may reflect specific issues
of sustainability, but they would normally be set at a level of performance that
would enable the venture to comply with the standard most of the time, since
otherwise the application of the ecolabel would put some of the venture's products
at a disadvantage, and possibly with significant commercial implications.
In the seafood industry, such internal standards, while meeting present-day com-
mercial operational requirements and criteria, may not necessarily be in accord with
either government or community expectations for the environmental impacts of the
fisheries or the aquaculture operations. In addition, since the process of conducting
the compliance assessment is not normally exposed to either peer review or public
critique in first-party certification systems, the compliance assessment process is
not exposed to independent verification. Such systems are usually considered to be
self-assessment systems (ISO Type II labelling), and are not renowned for their ro-
bustness in terms of achieving major improvements in ecological sustainability. The
main purpose and value of such systems is to provide an internal audit mechanism
for reducing the gap between the best- and worst-performing products/ventures
in terms of sustainability, without drawing a lot of market attention to the issues,
which may carry significant adverse implications for poorly performing individual
operators or aberrant ventures and for the sector as a whole.
The internal seafood sustainability assessment system operated by Ahold pro-
vides a useful example of a first-party assessment system (Box 1.1).
Box 1.1 The Ahold Sustainable Seafood Initiative
Ahold is an international group of quality supermarket and foodservice operators
based in the US and Europe, with headquarters in Amsterdam (www.ahold.com).
Ahold has retail operations in the US and Europe, serving over 2 million
customers every week through its supermarket chains Albert Heijn, ICA,
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