Podcast: How UL’s ECOLOGO certification is shaping sustainable industrial equipment

PS: Your tidbit about UL being strongly influenced at its founding by the insurance industry is, I think, a really interesting point for our audience. I've often tried to argue that one of the best friends the reliability and maintenance department can have is the finance and insurance department. There's no one in the organization who's going to be quicker to tell you what the risk exposure is of your company, and how the tools that you use—especially as a maintenance professional—can reduce that risk and reduce your premiums.

I've heard the occasional story here and there. One concrete one was a media company whose physical assets included electrical wires and electrical cables, and they had one condition monitoring technology in place to assess the reliability of those cables. The insurance team came to the reliability team and said, “Hey, if you can have a backup condition monitoring technology to measure the reliability of these cables, that will reduce our insurance premium by X percent.” So there's a strong connection, I believe, between reliability, sustainability, and mitigating risk in this way.

JS: Yeah, I think you're right about that, Tom. For reputable manufacturers—whom I know are in your audience—thinking about all those attributes is important. The thing about capital equipment like this power-packed molded-case circuit breaker that Schneider Electric has received the ECOLOGO certification for, is that these products are rated to last decades in some cases. So decisions that plant manufacturers are making now, in terms of the sustainability footprint of the products they're buying, will remain with us for a couple of decades.

On the one hand, I think that's why consumer products have received more attention: they just have such a much faster shelf life and product life, and it's been a little slower in capital goods. But on the other hand, for instance, the biodegradability of components—we need to get busy, right? We need to verify that, because when plants get decommissioned in 20 years, my view is societal norms will have changed a lot, and I think younger generations especially seem to increasingly value that whole kind of lifecycle approach.

So this is early days for this program in industrial, but I really think there's a substantial social benefit that can be achieved.

PS: I'm with you on that 100%. The younger workers in the field that I've talked to are focused strongly on sustainability and also on, frankly, certification. They want to make sure that what they're doing is process-based and aligns with industry standards.

Speaking of that, if I could read off a line from the ECOLOGO website, it's curious to know more about the standard this is based on. Part of the language says that ECOLOGO certifications “indicate that a product has undergone rigorous scientific testing and exhaustive auditing to prove its compliance with stringent third-party environmental standards.” You may have mentioned the standard before. Are these UL standards, or is this the standard you mentioned as having been developed based on the interest from Schneider?

JS: That's right. The standard is UL 2711. From an internal standpoint, the people who are involved are a combination of our sustainability experts as well as our power distribution principal engineers, working together with Schneider Electric but also soliciting input from other members of the industry.

It's very important to us that we don't create standards just for one company. I love the phrase “standards create markets.” When a standard is done well and everybody says, yeah, we agree on that—we agree on the technical specifications and we agree to adhere to them, and in our case go through a rigorous third-party evaluation—that actually can cause markets to move much faster. You have innovation, then you have what some refer to as the innovator's dilemma. And part of getting over that is getting broad-based agreement from industry, regulators, and consumers, and UL has always played an important role in that.

So we do have a standard for it, and as I mentioned, it's a multi-attribute standard. Some aspects of the product can be tested, and other aspects of the certification are more what we call a records review. So we will rigorously review the manufacturing processes, the full lifecycle. And it's natural for UL Solutions to do this because, when you're doing a sustainable certification on a product, you need to look at all the ingredients and components that go into it. Well, we look at quite a lot of those things anyway for safety, right? The way that we do safety certification is not simply we test the end product—like the molded-case circuit breaker—but we also test the plastics, the wiring cable that goes into it, and all the components, because it's more efficient to do that.

That's something that's evolved over decades at UL Solutions. A plastics manufacturer is the right customer to work with to validate the attributes of the plastics, whether it's for flammability (which is our core safety mission) or biodegradability, recyclability, etc. And so we work across the whole value chain and ultimately with the end customer who’s applying for the ECOLOGO certification.

PS: I've got two more questions for you today, Jeff. The first one is more of a “what if” situation. Let's talk about some of the ways facilities could integrate ECOLOGO into their sourcing inventory workflow. And to use your example of the molded-case circuit breaker from Schneider Electric, if you're a manufacturer looking to understand which products would be certified ECOLOGO, is this the kind of thing where it's a supplier's responsibility to add that to the inventory sheet? How would the average procurement officer make sure they're sourcing ECOLOGO-certified equipment, if that's what they're looking for?

JS: I think the most impactful thing that your audience could do—anyone in your audience who's passionate about sustainability, who believes that sustainability is an attribute that should be required when they're buying equipment rather than, you know, an afterthought, or “I'll do it as long as it's no additional cost,” or whatever—first, I would say I encourage you to learn more about it. 

If you're in the market for molded-case circuit breakers, at UL, we don't promote any particular company, right? So this is not a plug for Schneider Electric products, but I would say ask about ECOLOGO with your suppliers. Especially right now, because this program exists for power distribution equipment, whomever you're working with for power distribution equipment, bring it up: say, “Hey, I heard about this ECOLOGO program,” and you can share the press release with them. “Are you familiar with this?”

And I say this not to be purely self-promoting—there is an element of that—but it’s because as a third party, we have to bring more people to the table, right? We have to, it’s both the sellers and the buyers. Your audience are the people we would consider the demand drivers for this. So they can go on our website, UL Solutions, and find more information about the ECOLOGO program and contact us. We don't just talk to the customers who buy from us; we're very happy to talk to industry. That's an important part of what we do.

PS: Okay. Well, and you sort of led into the last question, but to flip the equation: for manufacturers who do want to pursue ECOLOGO certification for any of their products, what are the first steps, and where can they go for further information?

JS: Yeah, I would encourage them just to come to our website and make an inquiry there; that’ll get routed to the right people. Certainly anyone is welcome to reach out to me directly, whether it's over LinkedIn or what have you. We're a 24/7 global company—always on and always open to talking to folks. And I think it starts there, it starts with a conversation because we are very willing to put more resources into expanding ECOLOGO for industrial products. But we also, like anything in life, you know, we want to work where there’s a room with a lot of oxygen. So if we can get a lot of oxygen in the room, then we'll work on this together with industry.

PS: That's terrific. And for people who are listening, I'll make sure that a link to Jeff's LinkedIn profile is available in the show notes, as well as a link to the ECOLOGO website. Jeff, thank you so much for taking time right before Thanksgiving. I hope you have safe travel this year if you're traveling.

JS: Thank you so much, Tom. It's really a pleasure to talk to you, and happy Thanksgiving to you as well.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.

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