Green Product Online Purchase Platform

Environmental claims	Definition
1.Low-polluting product	The product and its materials comprise of no particular substances or the amount of the substances in the product is lower than that of others at the same grade.
2.Compostable	The product or its materials can be biodegraded into homogeneous and stable humus-like substances.
3.Biodegradability	The product, under particular conditions, can be biodegraded to a certain level in a certain period of time.
4.Designs for Disassembly	After the product’s life time, its components can be disassembled by re-usage, recycling, reused energy or other measures to transfer it from wastes flow.
5.Designs for recycling	The product or its material can be recovered from wastes flow after collection treatment and can once again be material or product.
6.Reusability	The product maintains its original conformation and can be reused directly or be reused after recovering its function or partial function by proper procedures.
7.Using recycled material	The product uses recycled material with blending ratio of recycled material higher than that of the products at the same grade.
8.Extended product life time	The product is more durable or upgradable and designed to extend the life time to reduce the usage of resources or reduce the wastes.
9.Recovered energy	It could be treated as wastes but as energy recovered from material or energy by the management.
10.Resource-saving  manufacturing	Whilst producing a product, the reduction in material, energy or water usage is superior to that of the product at same grade.
11.Using reproducible  energy in manufacturing  or products	The reproducible energy such as solar power, wind power, biofuel and geothermal is applied to the products or producing processes.
12.Reduction in wastes	Reduction in waste mass flow as a result of variations in products or producing processes.
13.Using phase  energy-saving	The product, under the equal circumstance, can save more energy than other products can at same grade.
14.Using phase water-saving	The product, under the equal circumstance, can save more water than other products can at same grade.

Along with the global effort to promote Eco-labeled products, the EPA of Taiwan initiated the Green Mark products labeling as a voluntary scheme of environmental performance certification and product labeling in Taiwan beginning from 1992. It is aimed to endorse products that have less impact on the environment and resource saving, leading to less wastes and promotes recycling.

As the fundamental regulations for the promotion of Green Mark, the Directions for the Promotions of the Green Mark Products and the Directions of Green Mark Verification Commissioning System were published in November 1992. EPA assigned the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRT) to draft the Green Mark’s standards and products’ categories, verification procedure to reveal the first chapter for the Green Mark introduction.

In February 1993, the first versions of standards and products’ categories had been published and opened for application. Later in June, first batch of Green Mark certified products were officially available in the market. In February 1996, the official website for the Green Mark (Greenliving Information Platform) was established to enhance the promotion green consumerism. In 1997, the Environment and Development Foundation (EDF) was founded by ITRT as a solitary organization to facilitate the application and verification of the Green Mark and supports the refinement in the standards and products’ categories.

The accumulated number of Green Mark products’ categories is shown in the following chart.

Thanks to the gradual increase in the amount of products of the Green Mark or Type 2 Green Mark, EPA imposed the post-market verification since March 2011, where Regulations of Management and Operation of Environmental Protection was announced. It’s to clearly define the verification operation, including onsite verification, condition and management in sales area and sampling products for verification. The following figure showed the numbers of certificated products of Green Marks in each year:

In June 2012, EPA announced Directions of the Management for Verification Institutions of Eco-friendly Products to select and manage the certification institutions , which are assigned to cope with application, verification and certification. In November of the same year, EPA assigned the Environment and Development Foundation (EDF) and the Electronics Testing Center (ETC) as the 3rd party certification institutions for the EPA.

In the work seminar of GEN in 2018, the attending representative of our country, Chen Jingyuan, General Manager, was invited to give research report on evaluating the overall benefits of ecolabelling in our country in recent years, and voluntarily joined the ecolabelling performance evaluation research carried out by the Oeko-Institute appointed by German government. In the report, representative of our country systematically introduced the evaluation of ecolabelling benefits in various aspects since 2010, starting from the earliest ecolabelling economic benefits evaluation in our country, evolving to evaluating the environmental benefits of individual products; subsequently, redeveloped the environmental benefit index of a single value, and carried out the development of automatic environmental benefits calculation starting from 2018, only a few GEN members tried to carry out the aforesaid operation, over the years, in relevant GEN meetings, only representatives from Korea, China and our country once proposed the report in similar directions, and our technological leading in this part was the main reason why Oeko-Institute invited our country to join the research continuously.

Besides, owing to long-term input and establishment of reputation and connection, Chen, Ching-Yuan, General Manager of Environment and Development Foundation, has been successfully elected as the director of two-year term again with the second highest votes, which maintains our country's image of technological leading, and GEN platform is utilized to promote the international ecolabelling cooperation and southward development policy of our country; in the board meeting after annual meeting, apart from accepting the assignment of the chairman to continue to carry out GEN performance evaluation research, General Manager, Chen, Ching-Yuan, has also voluntarily joined the task group newly set by board meeting, which will carry out research on how to improve the degree of participation of GEN members and how to facilitate international cooperations between and among GEN members, and propose specific suggestions in the next board meeting.