C0100 - Introduction to the Card Eco-Certification scheme ("CEC")

Mission

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 an Environmental Claim, the CEC requirements; and
• evaluate an Environmental Claim against the CEC requirements; and
• publish a successfully evaluated Environmental Claim that has 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 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.

An Environmental Claim 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 every Environmental Claim that is CEC certified is:

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 Certification Process consists of the following steps:

• Vendor registers with the CEC Certification Body ("CeB").
• Vendor signs the CEC NDA
• Vendor defines in a form called cecQAF which product and site combinations (Environmental Claims) the Vendor seeks to be CEC certified and provides the completed cecQAF to the CeB.
• CeB sends quotation for the defined scope, Vendor accepts quotation, CeB sends invoice, Vendor pays the invoiced amount, CeB assigns CEC Assessor, sends expanded cecQAF.
• Vendor determines and enters the requested information into the cecQAF, sends the cecQAF to the CEC Assessor.
• CEC Assessor conducts CEC Assessment of the data provided by the Vendor.
• If sufficiently compliant, CEC Assessor progresses to calculation of CEC KEIs (Key Environmental Indicators), otherwise informs Vendor of necessary improvements and the process continues once Vendor has resolved the findings.
• Based on the KEIs, CeB together with Mastercard decides if each claim is certifiable.
• The Vendor receives CEC Certificates for Environmental Claims considered certifiable, and a notice for the claims not considered certifiable.

Environmental claims are periodically reviewed, typically annually.