On September 20, a meeting was held in Moscow at the Roskachestvo site: working group discussed the draft of national standard “Sustainable development of the brand (company). General provisions and assessment criteria”, taking into account environmental, social and managerial aspects of the green brand.
The draft standard was developed by the Green Brands League in conjunction with intellectual partner Roskachestvo and with the assistance of the company “Unilever”. It was based on the methodology of the League of Green Brands by assessment of level of green brands/companies’ sustainable development developed together with the company “Business Solutions and Technologies”.
“Standardizing the approach to assessing brand sustainability will enable to overcome the current situation with a variety of ESG methods and principles in the market. This makes it possible for unscrupulous market participants to use the absence of uniform rules as a competitive advantage, just to seem like a sustainable company. Standardization and subsequent certification for ESG principles will make such manipulations impossible,” Elena Sarattseva, deputy Head of Roskachestvo, said.
“We expect the National Green Standard to be effective tool for objective assessment of sustainability of green brands and development of green economy, to help avoid greenwashing, reduce the appearance of inaccurate data in the public space about social and corporate business responsibility. Members and Associate Members of Green Brand Leagues took an active part in the development and testing of green standard, and we are grateful to Roskachestvo for organizing effective work with stakeholders,” Anastasia Popova, President of the League of Green Brands, CEO of the project on sustainable development +1, noted.
Leading industry experts, representatives of big business, including Elena Feoktistova, Managing Director, Corporate responsibility, sustainable development and social entrepreneurship at RSPP, Irina Korshunova, Senior Director for Quality and Sustainability at “Vkusno – I tochka”, Ekaterina Volkova, Communications Director of JSC TetraPak, Elena Gorokhova, director of the ECA movement, Olga Nikishkina, project manager of EcoTechnologies Group, discussed the goals and objectives of the standard, and also prospects for the creation of a green register of companies and its advantages for business.
“The introduction of the standard will help the Russian market focus on a single coordinate system in the field of sustainable development, while the evaluation criteria reflected in the standard take into account the specifics for each industry,” Irina Antyushina, director of sustainable business development and corporate relations in, “Unilever”, commented.
Adoption of the standard will be the first step towards the National green strategy and development of a system for evaluating green products by life cycle, including supply chain assessment and climate business responsibility assessment.
The first version of the draft standard was submitted for public discussion on August 1 2022. It will last until October 1.
Based on the passage by green companies/brands of the second block of the standard questionnaire that takes into account industry specifics, the annual Green Brands League ranking is formed.