The Nordic Swan Ecolabel
The Nordic Swan Ecolabel is one of the world´s toughest environmental certifications – and as such, a powerful tool for producers and brand owners. It offers:
- A recipe on how to reduce the environmental impact from production and consumption of goods.
- A credible, third party certified guidance for their consumers and professional buyers to choose goods and services that are among the environmentally best.
The Nordic Swan Ecolabel is the official ecolabel of the Nordic countries, supported by all Nordic governments.
Established in 1989
The Nordic Swan Ecolabel was established in 1989 by The Nordic Council of Ministers as a voluntary ecolabelling scheme for the nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
The goal was to enable consumers and professional buyers to choose the environmentally best goods and services by giving an effective tool to help companies develop more sustainable products and services.
"The Swan Effect"
As forerunner companies in different branches have wanted to take a lead in the development towards a more sustainable world, it is now possible to obtain a Nordic Swan Ecolabel certification within 56 different product areas, counting more than 200 different product types.
Since it is hard to obtain a Nordic Swan Ecolabel, only the forward companies succeed. And in doing so, show the way for others to follow. Thus following the Nordic Council of Minister's vision and making "the Nordic region the most sustainable and integrated region in the world". We call it "the Swan Effect".
Today more than 25.000 Nordic Swan Ecolabel products and services are being sold in the Nordic countries, and the rest of the world is asking for them.
The Nordic Swan Ecolabel going global
In 1994, the Nordic Swan Ecolabel was one of the founders of the international network for ISO 14024 Type 1 ecolabels, the Global Ecolabelling network, GEN.
Managing the Nordic Swan Ecolabel
The Nordic countries work together via the joint organisation Nordic Ecolabelling with:
- Setting strict environmental requirements in all relevant phases of a product's life cycle.
- Settin strict requirements for chemicals used in ecolabelled products.
- Tightening requirements for goods and services continuously to create sustainable development.
- Certifying and verifying that all requirements are met before a product is approved.
