Intensified Product-orientated Environmental Initiative

6 The stakeholders

6.1 Introduction
6.2 Prerequisites for product initiative contributions
6.3 Which stakeholders are central to the product initiative?
6.4 The consumers
6.5 The trade sector
6.6 Manufacturers of goods and services
6.7 Other stakeholders - consequences to the product initiative

6.1 Introduction

There are a large number of stakeholders who may contribute to the development and sale of products with improved environmental properties. Product initiatives aim to ensure that all these stakeholders are willing and able to reduce the environmental impact of their own activities and are willing and able to influence other stakeholders to reduce their environmental impact.

Co-operation is vital
The co-operation of the stakeholders is vital. The development, marketing and sale of products with improved environmental properties require that all stakeholders contribute with know-how and other resources. Consumption choices must be made and priorities set, pointing in the right direction. These contributions to the initiative can only be expected as voluntary co-operation in promoting efforts. To the greatest extent possible, stakeholders must perceive it as being in their own interest to contribute to the product-orientated environmental initiative - otherwise the initiative will simply fail to achieve the desired effect.

Conclusions about the stakeholders
An analysis of the stakeholders shows as follows:

Background to the analysis
Stakeholder analysis and descriptions are based on the round-table discussions conducted, the references listed, and other contacts and experience available when drawing up the proposal for a product-orientated environmental initiative.

Chapter structure
This chapter starts with a discussion of some general prerequisites for expecting stakeholders to be willing and able to contribute to product initiatives. It then describes the stakeholders in whom it is particularly essential to take an interest as well as their conditions and possibilities for contributing to product initiatives.

6.2 Prerequisites for product initiative contributions

Today, a great deal of the stakeholders regard environmental efforts as an important social task. The authorities cannot merely view them as passive or reluctant stakeholders that have to be supervised and controlled. They are a medley with independent knowledge and interest in the field of trade and industry and the environment.

Stakeholders' knowledge, resources and interests are fundamental
This does not mean that the other stakeholders always have the same interests or the same knowledge as the authorities. However, it does mean that the authorities' efforts can and must be organised on the basis of an understanding of the stakeholders' knowledge, resources and interests. The authorities must try to stimulate the other stakeholders - by pushing and pulling - in order to get them moving in the necessary direction. Interaction is both collaboration and counteraction.

Powerful interests
Reconverting production and consumption to products with radically improved environmental properties will influence the basic conditions of existence of trade and industry as it will entail changes to basic consumption patterns and choices. And that involves, of course, very powerful interests. The product initiative is based on the precondition that environmental behaviour must be changed. The challenge is to develop the necessary and adequate means with which to achieve that aim. These means must be used in collaboration with the stakeholders in order to achieve the greatest positive effect possible - both environmentally and commercially.

Motivation

Positive motivation
Positive motivation can spring from environmental initiatives being viewed as correct in their own right or can serve other interests to which a value is attached. It can be the belief that it makes it easier to recruit qualified employees or that the market wants and is willing to pay a higher price for more environmentally sound products. An instance of negative motivation is the wish to avoid being penalised.

Disincentives
It works as a disincentive if environmental efforts are considered unethical - e.g. in connection with violent actions - or if it clashes with interests to which the stakeholder attaches value. This may be, e.g., the expectation that the market will not pay the extra cost of the environmentally sound product. It may be the perception that there is cheating going on whereby others are achieving gains in the environmental field to which they are not entitled by their conduct. Or it may be an awareness that the stakeholder is having a harder time meeting environmental requirements than competitors because the environment as a parameter is not the stakeholder's particular forte.

Positive attitudes - negative in terms of economy and competition
The manifestations during round-table discussions show that many of the stakeholders are positively motivated as regards attitude but the majority of stakeholders experienced mainly negative motivation in terms of economic and competition-related dimensions. This is understandable in light of the limited demand for products with improved environmental properties - cf. Chapter 5 on the market. If the initiative is to have any proper clout, a successful change in the motivation picture is a prerequisite. This calls for a change in the negative conditions and expectations from demand, costs and distortion of competition.

The pioneers and the sceptics
On the part of some manufacturers, trading companies and consumers, the current product-orientated environmental initiative is largely characterised by being propelled by "fiery souls", motivated by a mixture of their attitude towards and their faith in the long-term sense and necessity of such efforts.

It is essential that the product initiative is targeted at the many and varying degrees of sceptics in the various stakeholder groups and, at the same time, is able to support and co-operate with the pioneers.

Resources
The stakeholder's possibilities of contributing to the product-orientated environmental initiative depend on the internal resources available, and on the options open to the stakeholder for drawing on the resources of the world around him.

Internal resources
Internal resources include know-how, manpower and capital.

Know-how
The stakeholder needs know-how on environmental conditions in general and of the environmental problems which it is most important to influence - including a knowledge of the possibilities open to the stakeholder for doing something about these problems. For the consumer it will include e.g. a knowledge of the environmental impact of the goods and knowing which available goods to choose between while, for the product developer, it will include the entire gamut of knowledge needed for developing new products and for assessing the environmental consequences of the different choices during the design process.

Qualified labour and capital
Access to qualified labour and capital is a prerequisite if the stakeholder is to have the resources to carry out projects able to bring about a change in environmental impact. If, for example, a retailer is going to markedly increase the environmental information available to his customer, this will require that the organisation establishes a system capable of procuring this knowledge. It also presupposes that employees should be trained to disseminate that knowledge to the customers.

External resources
The external resources of importance to environmental initiatives include general framework conditions, access to labour and financing, and demand and infrastructure, as described in Chapter 5 on the market. In particular, they also include access to filling in gaps in the stakeholder's internal know-how from external sources - e.g. from the authorities or other stakeholders.

Scope

Dependence on others
Decisions made by the stakeholders with regard to product development or marketing take into account stakeholders' interaction with other stakeholders. A company responsible for an end product does not always have e.g. the power to implement all that it might like to in its dealings with raw material suppliers and subcontractors. If the stakeholder has to use e.g. a paint finish, for example, the market is dominated by a very small number of multinational suppliers. A medium-size Danish company is completely dependent on availability of finishing materials on the market. In a number of cases, the same goes for processing machinery, which may be altogether vital in making environmental improvements to production processes.

Different scope
The scope available to decision-makers is very different from one product group to another, and from one resource area to another. Within certain resource areas, the retail trade plays a dominant role in relation to the manufacturers while other resource areas are dominated by large international raw materials suppliers and subcontractors who constrict the options of the final manufacturer.

Targeted efforts
Product initiatives need to be targeted at specific resource or product areas. Within these individual areas, the central decision-makers must be identified so that the conditions and frameworks governing their decision-making can be changed.

The following review of the stakeholder groups examines the stakeholders' general features and the conclusions that can be drawn on this basis for any product initiative. Aspects specific to product areas are touched upon in the description of initiatives in selected product areas.

6.3 Which stakeholders are central to the product initiative?

A stakeholder's importance for a product initiative is determined by his ability to contribute to the development, production and sale of more environmentally sound products. The environmental properties of a product are a function of the actions and decisions taken by various stakeholders during different parts of the life-cycle of the product group and that of the individual products.

Properties determined in the development phase
During the development phase, the properties of each individual product are determined together with the principles for its manufacture, use and disposal. The development phase is thus crucial to the overall life-cycle impact. However, the individual developer is normally limited by the specialities and routines of his particular company. The willingness and ability of an individual company to innovate will often depend on its internal resources as well as on external conditions.

Good opportunities during the production phase
During the production phase, the manufacturer has the chance to influence the amount of environmental impact due to production - assuming environmental impact is not an invariable consequence of the properties of the products. For services, in particular, the very production process is entirely crucial to their environmental impact.

Marketing and distribution
A number of factors causing environmental impact can be traced directly to distribution in the form of pollution from e.g. packaging and transportation. In addition, the marketing and distribution determine which products are accessible to the other stakeholders and what information is available together with the products.

Customers, users and waste handlers
The number of customers choosing to purchase a given product determines the total use of that product - and hence, to some extent, also the total environmental impact of the product. Its use affects the environmental impact just as the way in which the user chooses to dispose of the product is important. With regard to disposal, the technologies used by the waste handlers will be of special importance.

Central stakeholders
The developers, manufacturers, distributors, customers, users and waste handlers are thus stakeholder groups whose choices and activities are of special importance to the environmental impact.

In this context, the manufacturer is not just the maker of the end product but also those manufacturers producing energy, raw materials, semimanufactures and ancillary agents used in the making of the end product. The distributors are the traders and carriers conveying the flow of products between the other stakeholders. The customers and the consumers are everyone - public and private customers alike - who purchases and uses the end products. The waste treaters handle the products after use. These stakeholders are both Danish and international.

Stakeholders who establish general frameworks
In addition, there are stakeholders who are instrumental in establishing various essential frameworks for the activities of the central stakeholders, including such conditions as financing, manpower, know-how and regulations:

Organisational stakeholders
The various stakeholder groups have built up organisations that act as spokesmen for these groups. There are great differences in the functioning of these organisations. As the organisations usually collaborate on environmental initiatives, it is essential to examine which organisations mediate the interests of the stakeholders. The organisation of civic interests, in particular, is complex as citizens organise themselves in different ways as consumers, employees and pro-environmentalists, on the basis of leisure activities, political interests, etc.

International stakeholders
Moreover, on the international negotiating stage, there are a number of stakeholders of significance to product initiatives. This applies to the large multinational companies, the different nation states and some of the international organisations that are mandated and resourced to represent independent viewpoints during the negotiations.

Joint understanding
Product initiatives must be based on an understanding of the individual stakeholders' conditions, resources and interests. Such an understanding is not static but must be built and developed in collaboration between the stakeholders as the product initiative evolves.

The three main stakeholders
The three main stakeholders in the product initiative are described below - the consumers, the goods manufacturers and the trade sector. Finally, a summary is given of the main consequences to the product initiative of the descriptions of the other stakeholders (see Appendix 1).

The descriptions are brief accounts of stakeholders based on aspects regarded as being essential to the product initiative. These descriptions are intended to constitute the discussion paper for the discussions with stakeholders on which the concretisation of this proposal will be based.

6.4 The consumers

Private consumption important to the environment
In 1994, Danish consumers' demand for goods totalled approx. DKK 500bn - corresponding to more than half the total demand in Denmark. In particular, the money was spent in the retail trade - where foodstuffs make up the largest single item - on the home, on transportation and on communications. Private consumption, calculated ad valorem, has more than doubled since 1950. A substantial part of the environmental impact from products can thus be attributed to private consumption. From the family's activities, a recently completed project has singled out meals, transportation and residential heating as being environmentally most significant /16/.

The population affects the environmental impact of products in a number of different capacities. As citizens, individuals are involved in ongoing social developments; and by voting and other political activities, they influence priority-setting in environmental and industrial policy-making. As consumers, we determine which of the available products that sell, how they are used and what happens to them during the initial stage of their disposal.

Highly organised
Compared with other countries, the Danes generally have a high degree of organisation. A sizeable proportion of the population is represented in trade unions and pension funds as wage earners and employees. In recent years, a number of trade unions have begun to view the external environment as part of their sphere of interest. For instance, in its programme manifesto /17/, the Danish General Workers' Union (SID) enters into a series of deliberations on the product dimension.

Many Danes are members of various leisure and special-interest organisations dealing with specific areas of interest and related political initiatives. In terms of the environment, for instance, hunts and angling associations are very active.

Environmental organisations
The organisations in the environmental field range from the highly practical, action-minded "Green Families" and "Green Lifestyle" through traditional grass-roots movements such as NOAH (- Friends of the Earth Denmark) and the Movement on Energy and Environment (OOA) to broad-based environmental movements, whose membership-driven funding allows them to have considerable specialist secretariats - e.g. the Danish Society for Nature Preservation. Various such organisations are affiliated to international movements such as Global Action Plan for the Earth, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.

Consumer organisations
In consumer issues, the interests of the population at large are safeguarded by a number of consumer organisations, some of which are linked with international organisations such as the European Environmental Bureau. They mainly focus is on issues such as consumer information, quality, health, the environment and prices. The way in which the individual associations prioritise different issues varies greatly. For instance, the Danish Consumer Council prioritises all issues of relevance to the consumer whereas the many buying groups and purchasing associations assign priority to obtaining cheap products.

In a product initiative, it is essential to involve the actual environmental organisations as well as the consumer organisations and trade unions in order to obtain real representation of interests and resources.

Motivation
Successful involvement of the population in a product initiative presupposes that the population is motivated and informed, and that it has adequate opportunities to modify its actions. There is considerable difference today between the proportion of the population stating that they wish to act and shop in an environmentally sound manner and the proportion actually buying environmentally sound products. A study from 1995 of the population's attitudes towards the environment and energy saving showed that e.g. approx. 75% of the respondents stated they are willing to pay 20% more for organic foods and kitchen hardware that economise on energy or water /18/.

Many less environmentally degrading products are more expensive than similar ordinary products today. The size in price difference, together with a number of other factors such as taste, availability and marketing, decides how great the demand for the product will be. The consumer panel at the Danish Consumer Council and the Council of Technology's consensus conference on future consumption and environment attached great importance to the price of goods encouraging environmentally sound consumer choices /19/.

There is experience to show that large parts of the population can be induced to take action on isolated environmental or health problems after an intensive media campaign. Participation is greatest in situations making extra demands on people. The change-over to unleaded petrol is almost complete now but it was also supported by the fact that it is easy and, at the same time, involved financial benefit for the consumer.

Close to the individual
It is a well-known fact that it is easiest to motivate to efforts that are closely related to the individual, rooted in the local community or, in some other way, impact directly on the consumer.

Easier access to simple information
The population at large currently needs easier access to information on the environment to enable it to act in line with its outlooks in the environmental field. Many are currently aware of a long string of aspects that can be included in evaluating the environmental impact of products. Yet, no overview is generally available of what can and should be taken into account in one's choice of consumption, or more detailed and comparable information on individual products.

At the same time, there is an overwhelming quantity of marketing messages that pretend to be factual environmental information but are actually misleading. As an example, a study of different clothing brands marketed as being environmentally sound by almost 40 different suppliers shows that only a few of the suppliers were in a position to supply precise documentation of the environmental properties of their clothing /20/. This misinformation leads to widespread scepticism with regard to environmental information.

The consumer panel at the consensus conference on consumption and the environment stressed that the consumer must be encouraged to make less environmentally degrading choices through information and dialogue. Of the concrete possibilities available for better information, the panel highlighted the "Swan Label" (the Nordic eco-label) and environmental product declarations.

Locally sourced knowledge
Consumers have a considerable need for easy access to relevant information on the environmental impact of products. Information to the consumer must be accessible at the right time in the right place. People especially want information from local sources such as retail outlets, local craftsmen and businessmen, fast-service counters, citizens advice bureaux and libraries. In addition, there is a need for knowledge about where to look for information on specific topics.

Limited access to environmentally sound products
There is still a limited selection of products identifiable through recognised labelling schemes, declarations or the use of data sheets as being less environmentally degrading. In order to keep up the population's interest, it is important to quickly boost this selection. Conversely, the rate at which the selection is increased, will largely depend on the reception that consumers give to the initial product selection. The consumer must thus be kept regularly informed about the presentation/identification of new, less environmentally degrading products.

6.5 The trade sector

Small Danish trading companies
The majority of Danish trading companies are small companies. More than half of them have an annual turnover of less than DKK 2.5m (1992) and almost 60% of the 36,000 VAT-registered wholesale companies have a turnover of less than DKK 1m (1993).

Turnover for the 44,000 VAT-registered retail companies averaged DKK 2.7m in 1991. The past decade has seen a structural trend towards larger company units and fewer shops/workplaces. Combined, the Danish Co-op (FDB) and Dansk Supermarked account for more than half of the turnover of the retail trade today.

42% of turnover in Denmark are effected in the trade sector, and 45% of Danish exports are effected by the trade sector /21/.

A pivotal role
The trade sector plays a pivotal role with regard to the product strategy as it has to function as a filter between manufacturers and purchasers. The sector is responsible for which of the approx. 200,000 different products available on the market that find their way onto the grocery shop shelves. It is not uncommon for a grocery store to stock between 1,000 and 3,000 different products.

Given that some 60% of goods are imported, it is important for the importer to pass on wishes and requirements to the foreign manufacturers with regard to the environmental properties of products. The trade sector plays an altogether pivotal role with regard to information as it can demand but also pass on information regarding the environmental properties of products.

Potential for interaction between trading companies and manufacturers
There is considerable potential for interaction between trading companies and manufacturing companies. Fruitful interaction may contribute to ensuring that:

Danish-based production preferred
On the face of it, the greatest potential for initiatives by the trade sector involves product groups in which production is based in Denmark. Such products give the authorities, the consumers, and the wholesale and retail trades the possibility of acting as a powerful, collective dialogue partner in dealings with the manufacturers - without their requirements leading to a market take-over by foreign manufacturers. Especially for Danish products with a sizeable home market and exports to markets with a high level of environmental awareness, product initiatives can be relevant.

Difficult for smaller trading companies
Smaller trading companies are often supplied by a large number of manufacturers and do not have the volume or professional competence to make requirements to the manufacturer or supplier. This fact has assumed increasing importance, given the increased competition accompanying the creation of the Single Market. Of their own accord, these companies are thus unlikely to demand documentation of environmental properties or refuse to trade in products with the most inferior environmental properties.

Opportunities for big chains
The big chains within the retail and wholesale trades are very powerful stakeholders, capable of building up their own specialised environmental competence and making requirements to the manufacturers. As they themselves control parts of the production, they also have their own facilities for product development.

The trade sector's views
During the round-table discussions, representatives of the trade sector expressed that:

6.6 Manufacturers of goods and services

The group of goods and services manufacturers includes all companies contributing to the development and manufacture of the products. These stakeholders are of crucial importance to the environmental properties of the product. They are also crucial in determining what know-how is generated and disseminated on the environmental properties of the products and how these properties may be improved.

Danish and foreign companies
Approx. 40% of the goods consumed in Denmark are Danish-produced, and virtually all services supplied in Denmark are produced here by Danish and foreign companies. Developing and manufacturing products with improved environmental properties presupposes active and creative initiatives from Danish as well as foreign manufacturers - and from manufacturers in charge of their own development initiatives as well as manufacturers who put others' ideas into production.

As a group of stakeholders, the manufacturers are decisive to product initiatives, and any product initiative is conditional on setting up constructive interaction with the manufacturers and obtaining an in-depth knowledge of their conditions within the various resource areas.

Description of manufacturers
The conditions of the manufacturer group vary greatly, depending on the product involved and on which market it is sold.

Goods manufacturers
Private production of goods contributes approx. 1/3 of the GNP and employs a corresponding share of the labour force, i.e. approx. 750,000 full-timers.

The goods manufacturer group comprises the following sectors: manufacturing, building and construction, and agriculture, of which the manufacturing sector is the most important of these in terms of economy and employment.

Both internally and mutually, the individual sectors are subject to widely different conditions of competition and development. However, one basic feature in common is that companies are increasingly being drawn into a global division of production, with the individual company processing a minor subcomponent of the finished end product.

Service producers
Producers of services include a large and very heterogeneous group of companies, including everything from international currency trading through forwarding agents to shoe resoling. The importance of service production in Danish society is rapidly growing. The Danish Ministry for Business and Industry's resource area analysis estimates that the service trades have an employment growth potential equivalent to 100-125,000 new jobs up to the year 2003.

Though intangible by definition, many services do cause an impact on the environment as a number of products are normally used for producing a service, e.g. detergents, machinery, spare parts, chemical substances, etc., just as they nearly always involve transporting goods and people.

The choice of products and organisation of work routines is decisive to the overall the environmental impact caused by the service. Furthermore, the service sector is important to the product initiative in so far as the services in themselves contribute to that initiative. This applies to e.g. the services of the financial sector and to those of the know-how suppliers and suchlike. These stakeholders are discussed independently in Appendix 1.

Limited knowledge of services and the environment
The knowledge available on environmental conditions in connection with the production of services is very limited. This is partly due to the limited extent to which the service sector has been the focus of current environmental initiatives. The following description has therefore been concentrated on the conditions of the goods manufacturers.

Corporate environmental behaviour
Most goods manufacturers today have a good grasp of the environmental impact from their production processes, many having accumulated a certain environmental know-how as a result /22/. Very few companies have dealt with the impact caused by other parts of the product life-cycle.

Pioneer companies
There are, however, a number of pioneer companies already making a goal-oriented effort to improve the environmental properties of their products. They are to be found in all categories of companies though, of course, mostly in those categories with the largest in-house development resources. The change in managerial attitude is the one single factor emphasised by the pioneer companies as being most significant to their change-over from being "wait-and-see sceptics" to being "active pioneers". This change of attitude is not immediately explicable on the basis of changing requirements from the outside world or other objective factors. Rather, it should be seen as a change in the understanding of these factors. Accumulating know-how regarding the causes of these changes in attitude and how they can be promoted is essential to the product initiative.

In the further work on the product-orientated environmental initiative, it is also important not only to support, but also to derive support from, the work being done at these pioneering companies. In particular, co-operation should be established with pioneer companies in the product fields in which pilot projects are initially being launched.

Product development
The development of products with improved environmental properties will need to be made as an integral part of the general development activities of the companies. It is thus interesting to look at the conditions for these activities in the case of Danish goods manufacturers. Taking product development as a basis, Danish manufacturing companies can be divided into four types:

Traditional small and medium-size companies
Companies with few resources to make product and process innovation. The product and process development of the companies is determined by input from machinery and materials suppliers as well as external resource and know-how centres. Product development collaboration - between the companies as well as with the public sector - is vital for product development in many such companies.

Large-scale operations
Companies focusing on process development, with large in-house capacity to undertake it. Dairies, sugar mills, etc.

Specialised machinery and equipment manufacturers
Flexible, often smallish, manufacturers with a high degree of product development that is customer specific. Manufacturers of industrial paints, sealants, etc.

Research-based companies
Companies based on the company's own R&D capacity carrying out continuous product development. The developmental force in these companies is based largely on in-house resources in relatively close co-operation with public R&D institutions. To a large extent, the process of consolidating the environmental dimension of the product development of these companies is done by incorporating environmental assessments as a permanent element of publicly subsidised R&D projects. Table 6.1
Development activities in industry, broken down into company types

Source: 1995 Business Report

The various forms of developmental behaviour and competence require some differentiation of the means and instruments used in relation to specific company types.

Factors of importance to development
The following factors are essential to the developmental behaviour of the companies:

Customer requirements
Customer requirements are among the most important reasons altogether for companies making innovations in the product field. The ever increasing spread of environmental management systems within major international groups will largely result in requirements being made to subsuppliers with regard to substantiating the environmental properties of their subsupplies. Especially within the group of specialised machinery and equipment manufacturers, there will be a distinct need for subsuppliers able to document the environmental conditions of their products and their company.

In research-based companies and within the medical/health and telecommunications fields, the public sector often plays a crucial part as product purchasers. Public development contracts containing environmental requirements will be a good tool with regard to swaying product innovation towards the development of cleaner products.

Internal competence
Developing cleaner products calls for the company organisation to be able to pick up on signals in the environmental field. At the same time, the resources and competence must be available to respond to these signals. In relation to smaller companies, it is especially vital to enhance internal competence. The results of the programme "The Environment and Working Environment in Small Companies" show that a low level of developmental and environmental competence in-house is greatly strengthened by appointing competent employees to build up environmental and working environmental management in these types of company.

Quantity and quality of available environmental know-how
A main condition for including environmental considerations in product development is the presence of reliable and usable environmental know-how. At general level, the quantity and quality of environmental product know-how is still in the early stages of development.

Environmental regulation
The product innovation time frame stretches several years into the future for major companies belonging to the categories of large-scale and research-based companies. It is central in this regard that there should be some long-term indication as to the environmental problems that need to be prioritised, e.g. substances and materials that should be substituted. Such an indication will provide important guidelines for the often sizeable investments in development made by these companies.

Furthermore, there should be some regulation of individual substances and materials in a co-ordinated joint effort to develop new substitutional technologies.

Product standards
Much of the time, the bulk of corporate product development is elaborated on the basis of pre-determined product standards. In continuation of the work of creating the EU Single Market, product standards will play a sharply increasing role. To an even greater extent, compliance with particular standards will determine the sale of goods and semimanufactures.

Inclusion of environmental considerations - or, at least, of awareness of not preventing environmental consideration - in the individual product standards will thus be of great importance. Care must be taken that standards have a supportive effect and, more particularly, do not block the development of less environmentally degrading products.

Larger companies will be able to act as important allies by incorporating environmental criteria when negotiating international product standards.

6.7 Other stakeholders - consequences to the product initiative

Appendix 1 contains a description of know-how producers and brokers, the financial sector, counties and municipalities, government stakeholders and, to exemplify international stakeholders, a description of the multinational goods manufacturers, the nation states and the European Commission. The following is a summary of the main consequences to product initiatives that may be derived from these descriptions. The initiatives proposed in the next chapter are partly based on these analyses.

Know-how brokers
The know-how brokers and manufacturers must be involved in the discussions on organising the product initiative, partly in order to incorporate the know-how they represent and partly in order to ensure their active backing for further efforts. The know-how brokers generally need to be provided with greater know-how on the environment.

Public funding is crucial to producing publicly available knowledge and to producing know-how whose generation is without commercial interest.

The financial sector
For parts of the business community, particularly the small and medium-size companies, it is difficult to get credit to finance new projects such as product development. It is thus important for product initiatives to include financing options for companies wishing to develop and introduce products with improved environmental properties.

Product initiative backing by the financial sector presupposes the existence of a positive link between the product initiatives of the companies and their ability to honour their obligations to investors and lenders.

It is important to supply the financial sector with the necessary competence in the environmental field. This can be done primarily in the form of training and supplementary training efforts within the sector.

Counties and municipalities
It is important that counties and municipalities are actively involved in the product initiative. They are important not only as supply companies and environmental authorities but also as macroconsumers and promoters of business innovation and Agenda 21 activities.

Genuine activation of the potential of the local authorities will require political and financial backing.

Greater use of cleaner products within the supply and welfare services requires a generally higher level of know-how on the environmental impact of products.

In terms of local use of products containing environmentally problematic substances that cause problems to waste and wastewater treatment plants, the municipality can play an active informative role in reducing the local use of such substances.

The official sector
The official sector has activities in a number of fields of importance to the product initiative.

The extent, to which environmental assessments are carried out, is insufficient when various forms of private-sector product development are being publicly funded.

Many ministries are already making environmental requirements in administrating their subsidy and loan schemes. In particular, the Danish Ministry for Housing and Building and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries have incorporated environmental considerations in their product-orientated subsidy schemes. There has not been the same degree of development in relation to the Ministry for Business and Industry's grant and loan-financing schemes. What is needed is a more systematic environmental assessment of company projects eligible for financing by, e.g., the Danish Fund for Industrial Growth. Easy-to-use tools are also desired with which to screen these types of projects from an environmental angle.

The main responsibility for a large number of product and performance standards rests with the sectorial ministries. Furthermore, they are the main negotiators on EU directives within their areas of jurisdiction. As a fixed procedure of standardisation activities, sectorial ministries should contribute to ensuring that environmental assessments are directly involved in the standardisation process. In the context of EU legislation, sectorial ministries should ensure that environmental considerations are embodied in the actual directive work and that environmental assessments are included as a requirement in any mandates made of CEN.

Government procurement of food and beverages, medicine, health care articles and office supplies as well as fuels such as oil, electricity and gas form an essential part of the total Danish turnover on the relevant product groups. For this very reason, it is essential to have a consistent public and eco-conscious procurement policy in these and other areas in order to establish a stable market for less environmentally degrading products.

Know-how and information on the environmental properties of products are part of the basic instruments used in the product-orientated environmental strategy. The Danish EPA's co-operation with the National Consumer Agency of Denmark should be strengthened and campaigns co-ordinated in terms of the areas of action on the energy front.

International stakeholders
The initiatives from the European Commission within the environment, trade and standardisation are of crucial importance to conditions for manufacturing and selling less environmentally degrading products. In particular, it is possible to influence the elaboration of these initiatives at an early stage of the process.

The European Commission is planning to elaborate a product-orientated environmental strategy. Neither here nor in any of our neighbouring countries that are working on a product-orientated environmental initiative has particularly much progress been made, however.

The Netherlands
The Netherlands have learned that a purely information-based effort targeted at consumers is not sufficient. Also, other kinds of market influence are needed. Since the mid-eighties, the Netherlands have had an official list of undesirable substances. The experience gained from this list is that it has very largely been appreciated and used as an instrument in the product development work of the companies.

Germany
Germany's experience with manufacturers' liability for packaging waste (the Grüner Punkt) shows that it is possible to achieve considerable waste reductions in this way, but that the cost of doing so has also been very high. Work is continued to extend manufacturers' liability to all parts of the product life-cycle.

Sweden and Norway
Also Sweden and Norway are working on initiatives targeted at all parts of the product life-cycle though no experience has yet been collected on the impact of such efforts. Here again, work is being done to increase manufacturers' liability for all parts of the product life-cycle.

In terms of interaction with other countries, it should be realised that the long-term prospects of a growing market for environmentally sound products mean that this interaction is not a "zero-sum game". In a growing market, one man's gain needs not mean another man's loss.