X0100 - Introduction to the Card Eco-Certification scheme ("CEC")

Mission

The CEC has the following mission:

• Prevent Mastercard products being associated with “green washing”.
• Help bringing products to market that have an environmental advantage, and help associate Mastercard with the notion of environmental improvement.
• Ensure that, when a Mastercard product is associated with an environmental claim, the environmental claim is:
  • Feasible
  • Meaningful and verifiable
  • Supported and sustained

Purpose

Purpose of the CEC is to:

• develop and maintain a set of requirements for Environmental Claims, the CEC requirements; and
• evaluate Environmental Claims against the CEC requirements; and
• publish those Environmental Claims that have been found compliant with the CEC requirements.

What is an Environmental Claim?

An Environmental Claim is:

• a clear and concise description of the improvements of a modified product or service’s environmental impact, including a clarification of connected adverse effects.
• Allowing Vendors of a Mastercard branded product to establish an “Environmental Claim” in line with a target market, taking into account regional and local preferences, local understanding of environmental issues, and aspects of the vendor’s product portfolio and capabilities.

Using the concept of Environmental Claim as the basis for the CEC provides more flexibility and openness towards technical innovations we currently cannot foresee, compared to a more static approach solely comparing product performance against a defined and limited set of criteria and categories.

Environmental Claims shall be expressed relative to the environmental performance of an existing product, Concisely and consistently expressing the improvement as less or more of something that is relevant to the environment.

What are the CEC requirements about?

The purpose of the CEC requirements is to ensure that Environmental Claims published on the CEC website are:

Feasible:

• Technically possible
• Materials and components and processes are available
• Limitations of material and component availability are understood

Meaningful and verifiable:

• Consistent, precise, concise, not misleading
• Limitations defined and verbally expressed with the claim
• In line with current scientific understanding of environmental management and environmental impact of materials.
• Secondary effects have been investigated and found not to compensate the primary, intended effects.

Supported and sustained:

• Supported by the organization making the claim (Policies, Organization, Processes & Procedures)
• Within the organizations capabilities

See section Requirements for more details and the requirements themselves.

How does the CEC Evaluation Process work?

The CEC Evaluation Process consists of the following steps:

• Vendor registers with the CEC Certification Body ("CeB").
• Vendor conducts a self-assessment based on a pre-defined questionnaire, called the CEC Assessment Plan (referred to as "cecAP"), and provides the completed cecAP to the CeB.
• A CEC Assessor reviews the completed cecAP and conducts a Remote Assessment of the Vendor's claim and supporting organization and processes, prepares a report based on the cecAP, and submits it to the Vendor and the CeB.
• The CeB validates the report against a defined set of CEC Report Validation Rules
• Upon successful validation, the CeB issues a CEC Certificate to the successful vendor, and publishes the Claim in the Register of Environmental Claims.

Environmental claims are periodically reviewed, typically annually.