ULE 880 - Sustainability for
Manufacturing Organizations

Project Backgrounder




ULE 880 - Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations is a sustainability standard for businesses and other organizations, focusing on their environmental and social performance, designed to create uniform and global metrics for customers, stakeholders and trading partners.
 

Read project overview here.

The vision: A uniform, globally applicable system for rating and certifying companies of all sizes and sectors on a spectrum of environmental and social performance characteristics. ULE 880 will fill a major void in being able to consistently understand and measure how, and how well, a company is doing in understanding, addressing, and communicating its environmental and social impacts. It will also provide a common yardstick and language by which to measure and compare companies on social and environmental issues.
 
The goal: Providing a standardized mechanism that allows organizations and their stakeholders to factor companies' environmental and social performance into their core decision-making processes, thereby elevating the importance of these issues within companies.
 
Who's behind it: ULE 880 is a partnership between UL Environment (ULE), a division of Underwriters Laboratories, and Greener World Media, an independent media and business information services company. ULE 880 is an extension of research funded from 2004 to 2007 by StopWaste.Org, a public agency in Alameda County, California, which became a springboard for further development into a sustainability standard.
 
How it works: ULE 880 is a point-based rating system. Companies seeking certification will require third-party verification of all submitted data to UL Environment and authorized verification bodies.
 
What it measures: ULE 880 includes five domains of company operations:
  • Sustainability Governance: how an organization leads and manages itself in relation to its stakeholders, including its employees, investors, regulatory authorities, customers, and the communities in which it operates.

  • Environment: an organization’s environmental footprint across its policies, operations, products and services, including its resource use and emissions.

  • Workforce: issues related to employee working conditions, organization culture, and effectiveness.

  • Customers and Suppliers: issues related to an organization’s policies and practices on product safety, quality, pricing, and marketing as well as its supply chain policies and practices.

  • Social and Community Engagement: an organization’s impacts on its community in the areas of social equity, ethical conduct, and human rights
Key attributes: Among the other key attributes and core principles of ULE 880:
 
  • Attainable but Aspirational: ULE 880 establishes criteria that sustainability experts agree are aggressive but also feasible to achieve and verify. However, only the best of the best companies will be able to achieve the highest level of certification.

  • Prerequisites: ULE 880 certification criteria include pre-requisites, minimum thresholds of performance companies must meet for certification. A company must achieve thresholds in all five environmental and social domains in order to be certified at any level.

  • Disclosure: ULE 880 is designed to reward transparency, encouraging disclosure of companies’ ULE 880 performance and scores. Companies may not be able to achieve the higher levels of certification without engaging in higher levels of transparency.

  • Quantitative: ULE 880 criteria emphasizes verifiable measures. The auditing and certification process has been designed to be repeatable so as to yield the most consistent outcomes and least variability possible when used by different assessors or when rating different organizations within the same sector.

  • Integration: Whenever possible and appropriate, ULE 880 is built upon and harmonizes with existing standards, with a priority given to global, company-level standards. More than 70 standards are referenced within ULE 880.

  • Leadership and Innovation: ULE 880 gives Innovation Points to companies that go above and beyond current best practices to find innovative ways to address their environmental and social impacts.

  • Learning Tool: Beyond its use in a standard and certification system, ULE 880 is designed to be a learning tool for companies, with the goal of helping them better understand how they might measure up in advance of seeking certification.

  • Transparency: The details behind the ULE 880 standard itself will be transparent to all.

  • Credibility: ULE 880 is built upon the acquired and collective wisdom of sustainability and business practitioners and thought leaders, and more than a century of standards development by Underwriters Laboratories. The verification process will rely upon the use of third-party, well-trained auditors to evaluate company performance.

  • Continuous Improvement: ULE 880 is intended to be a dynamic standard and will strive for continuous improvement, with periodic updates that reflect the current state of the art.
 
Intended markets:ULE 880 is designed principally as a procurement tool, allowing companies, public agencies, and institutional buyers to assess the performance of their supply chains and trading partners. It is intended to complement existing and future procurement specifications, which typically don’t look beyond product and service specifications to the performance of the companies that provide them. ULE 880 has potential additional applications for socially responsible investors, customers, prospective employees, and others seeking credible information on a company’s environmental and social performance.
 
Stakeholder input: Stakeholders have been and will continue to be engaged throughout the development of the ULE 880 standard, in four phases:
 
  • In the Plan and Design phase, a group of expert advisors were engaged and consulted toward the goal of creating a comprehensive draft standard.

  • In the current Build phase, a larger group of stakeholders representing manufacturers, government, non-governmental organizations, the socially responsibility industry and others have been engaged to provide feedback during the public comment period, with the outcome of providing a fully formed standard to the market place. Additionally, we have communicated an open invitation for interested stakeholders to contact us at standards@ulenvironment.com if they wish to participate in this review. A smaller group of sustainability experts will be engaged to advise the ULE-GreenBiz team on the integration of this feedback.

  • In the Test phase, a small set of manufacturers will be engaged to pilot the standard and the verification/certification delivery model.

  • In the Deploy and Improve phase, ULE 880 will be released to the market place and the standard will be reopened for stakeholder comment to foster continuous improvement.
During all phases, technical advisors are being engaged to ensure that state-of-the-art thinking and best practices are included in both the design and objectives of the standard.
 
Timetable: The public draft ULE 880 - Sustainability for Manufacturing Organizations is now open for public comment, with ULE 881 - Sustainability for Service Organizations following later in 2010.
 
More information: Visit www.ulenvironment.com

 

ULE 880 Ratings Overview
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