The Milieukeur certification schemes for plant products have been added to the international website Standards Map. With this addition Milieukeur presents to a large and international audience what the Milieukeur certification schemes stand for and how Milieukeur certified products score on different sustainability aspects.
Standards Map is an independent website and provides insight and transparency in the content of a large number of international sustainability standards like Fairtrade, UTZ, Fair for Life, LEAF and organic.
About Standards Map
Standards Map is an independent platform with information about more than 170 international sustainability standards and provides the possibility to benchmark these standards. The Standards Map website and the database behind the website are managed by the International Trade Centre (ITC) in Switzerland.
With the information on Standards Map retailers and customers can measure which standards comply to the sustainability aspects that are important to them. The website also provides the possibility to compare different sustainability standards.
The sustainability standards on Standards Map are measured with the use of a very comprehensive list of checkpoints. Five sustainability aspects (‘hotspots’) are distinguished: environment, social, ethics, quality and management.
Milieukeur on Standards Map
The figures presented below show the results of Milieukeur on Standards Map.
Figure 1 displays how Milieukeur scores on each of the five sustainability hotspots and points out that the Milieukeur scheme contains predominantly criteria about 'environment'.
Figure 2 focuses on the hotspot 'environment'. In the left figure the Milieukeur open field cultivation score is presented and the right figure shows the Milieukeur protected cultivation score. The figures show that most of the environmental criteria are on 'chemicals' (crop protection products). Open field cultivation also contains a lot of criteria on 'biodiversity'. Besides these there are also criteria on other theme’s like waste, water and CO2 emission.
Figure 1 Figure 2
Figure 1. The Milieukeur score on the different sustainability aspects (hotspots) on Standards Map.
Figure 2. The Milieukeur score on the different subjects of the environmental hotspot on Standards Map. On the left Milieukeur open field cultivation and on the right side Milieukeur protected cultivation.
Besides this overview, Standards Map provides the possibility to focus on each checkpoint to see what this requirement entails. By focussing on crop protection, the exact criteria on the use of crop protection can be retrieved. This includes, amongst others, the prevention of emission and the limitation of crop protection products that damage the environment.
Points of attention
The comparison on Standards Map provides information about the number of checkpoints covered by a standard. However, Standards Map does not compare de content of these checkpoints and does not value the criteria.
For example, two different standards can both score on the requirement 'energy saving'. However, Standards Map does not measure how restrictive this requirement is. The standard with more restrictive criteria will score the same as a standard with less restrictive criteria. Therefore, the user of Standards Map should focus on the content of the criteria for a good comparison between standards.
