How GreenCircle Certified Helps Businesses Prove Sustainability and Gain Consumer Trust

Sustainable customers are becoming more prevalent, and they’re seeking out a multitude of ways to be eco-friendly in their everyday lives. While this includes actions like using less plastic and being overall waste conscious, these customers are also seeking out companies that are making eco-friendly pledges. Now, businesses are under more pressure than ever to be environmentally friendly, waste-averse, and sustainable. Luckily for them, companies like GreenCircle Certified offer companies a credible stamp of approval, certifying sustainability claims.

GreenCircle Certified is an independent third-party certification company that verifies the accuracy of environmental claims made by various businesses. By verifying efforts such as waste diversion, recycled content, energy reductions, and sustainable manufacturing practices, GreenCircle can help companies be transparent with consumers and ensure companies are making good on sustainability claims. As businesses look to attract the growing pool of environmentally conscious consumers, a GreenCircle Certification can be a game changer.

At Sustainability Brands 2024, Ryan Heins, an account manager at GreenCircle Certified, told Waste360 more about the process and why it is so paramount for companies to get their sustainability efforts certified. Heins has been in his position for four years and looks into the feasibility and viability of certification for companies. Heins dove into what a GreenCircle certification can mean to a company looking to get certifications in today’s climate and the challenges companies face when looking at sustainability goals and getting certified.

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A significant challenge in today’s marketplace is distinguishing genuine sustainability efforts from marketing ploys and “greenwashing,” As consumers become savvier and demand proof of environmental claims, a certification from GreenCircle can give a company an advantage over competitors. Heins explains that a certification from GreenCircle means trust and transparency to consumers and that when a claim is made, it’s made with the validation of an external entity that has backed up those claims.

“[Companies] are trying to find a way to tell their story, and certification has been a way to help tell that story from an unbiased perspective, or at least supports the story from that perspective,” said Heins.

Now, to ensure that a GreenCircle Certification isn’t just a fancy sticker, GreenCircle itself sought out its certification. GreenCircle earned an accreditation through ANAB, an ISO 17065 which is considered the gold standard in transparency, to hold itself to a higher standard and keep a level of integrity when certifying other companies.

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When it comes to what companies are looking to get certified, Heins explains GreenCircle hears from a lot of manufacturers, because they have a lot of waste streams. This includes auto manufacturers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, food and beverage manufacturers, and so on. Since waste is pretty much in every industry, thousands of companies can open themselves up to get certified and grab the attention of sustainable consumers, including certified Colleges that want to run programs and communicate to future students and the younger generation that a Campus is doing what it needs to, to be environmentally friendly.

Sustainability isn’t just a feature for these companies or brands anymore, it is integral to every business’s story now that sustainability is heavily on the public’s mind. Heins shared a story about how Subaru Indiana touted its sustainability and zero-waste initiatives for years at its plant and GreenCircle asked them if they wanted to, “prove it” and get certified. Finally, Subaru Indiana did and now can wear the GreenCircle badge proudly.

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“It just adds that shred of credibility,” said Heins. “It’s a story that they’ve always had because they wanted to tell it, but now [the certification] put a little bit more behind it.”

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to certifying a company or business is simply dealing with the scope of them. If a company has 15 different sites, the time and manpower to audit each of those sites becomes a huge task. Because of this, GreenCircle has developed a Waste System Audit.

“The biggest challenge is that companies don’t want to dedicate the resources to certify every site,” said Heins.

The Waste System Audit allows GreenCircle to look at the procedures and processes in a company’s playbook for how each of its sites should be operating and audit and interview a handful of those locations and see if the playbook is being followed.

“We’d go visit those sites to audit every single waste stream and then bring together all of that data and roll it together as Company XYZ and say, ‘across their whole portfolio, they’re diverting 80%’,” said Heins.

“The Waste System Audit brings together an opportunity where we can look at every site and look at every portfolio, like, if there’s high performing sites or low performing sites, average it all together and looks at this as one entity, not 15 different sites, [giving us] the percent of waste that’s devoted across all of those sites."

Heins wrapped up our chat at Sustainable Brands with some advice for companies that are on their waste diversion journeys and may want to be certified soon:

“I would say first, understanding the waste streams and what’s actually happening with [materials] and then start with the low-hanging fruit,” said Heins.

“The other thing I would say is, leveraging best practices within the industry. We all have competitors in the industry, and it would behoove those companies to talk to somebody in the industry who is doing better or even internally if [a company] has a different site that is handling waste differently and is performing really well.”