For a company with more than 115 years of history under its belt, Underwriters Laboratories is making big plans for the future.

The not-for-profit company, which started in 1894 as an outgrowth of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, has in just the past three years made a decision, and big commitment to expanding its presence beyond the electrical and fire safety and into the environmental space.

"The first line of the UL mission is to promote safe living and working environments for people," UL CEO Keith Willams explained to the audience at the State of Green Business Forum in Chicago last week. "We think that's what we've done with electricity going back to the beginning of the 20th century."

But relatively recently, safety has expanded to include, in many instances, environmental concerns as well.

"When you think about safe living and working environments, clearly the impact of products on the environment is a critical area, and we saw more and more of our clients' concerns about hazardous materials that were in their products," Williams said. One example he offered was about the discussions -- at times "very contentious discussions," according to Williams -- between UL, the Consumer Electronics Association and the National Association of State Fire Marshals, where brominated flame retardants came under debate. Williams said that the fire marshals wanted all the plastics on your TV to be brominated so TVs won't burn, and the CEA was opposed to BFRs because of environmental and health concerns from those chemicals.