Solution: OK renewable

The concept of renewability is becoming increasingly crucial as industries and consumers alike seek to reduce their carbon footprint, especially the scope-3 emissions. Our ‘OK renewable’ certification addresses this need by ensuring that products meet stringent renewable carbon standards.

This is what led the nova Institute to launch the Renewable Carbon Initiative (RCI) in 2020, one of the first actions of which was to set up a multi-sectoral “Labelling” working group in which we participated, in order to develop the renewable carbon share (RCS) concept. It is therefore quite natural that the RCI turned to us to implement the RCS concept through the “OK renewable” certification scheme.

Renewable carbon entails all carbon sources that avoid or substitute the use of any additional fossil carbon from the geosphere.

Renewable carbon can come from the biosphere (biomass), atmosphere (CO2) or technosphere (recycling) but not from the geosphere (fossil), creating a carbon circular economy between the biosphere, atmosphere or technosphere.

OK renewable allows to combine these different sources into one single statement.

A Renewable Carbon Share (RCS) of x% means that

• the proportion of mass containing Renewable Carbon is x% of the total carbon-containing mass (renewable-based)

and/or

• the equivalent amount of feedstock of the mass containing fossil carbon has been replaced by feedstock containing Renewable Carbon in the production plant (renewable-attributed),

as documented by established certificates.

Focusing on the mass containing renewable carbon, rather than just renewable carbon, is necessary to allow for a fair inclusion of dedicated bio-based materials, such as PLA, where bio-based oxygen (included in the mass) also replaces fossil carbon. This would be lost if we only considered carbon.

At first, 9 established underlying certification schemes have been selected :

• Biobased (NEN)
• DIN Geprüft (DIN Certco)
• Flustix recycled
• ISCC+
• OK biobased & OK recycled (TÜV AUSTRIA)
• RecyClass
• RedCert2
• RSB

The project was then submitted to an Advisory Committee made up of stakeholders from RCI, nova Institute and TÜV Austria who met several times to validate the different stages of the development of the scheme, which was then tested on several case studies in order to verify its robustness.

As with our other conformity marks, this logo clearly declares its scope, specifies who the certifier is, who is the holder (via the “S code”) and finally quantifies the renewable share.