The Most Searched Certifications of 2019

Ecolabels are an important part of our industry, and they are vital to simplifying the search for sustainable solutions. They provide a quick and easy way to find products that are aligned with a green building-rating system like LEED or WELL, or green procurement guidelines or regulations. At ecomedes, we support all the major ecolabels and certification bodies in the marketplace.

Whether they are working on new buildings or major renovations, project teams typically reference these performance standards in the specification documents. Products and solutions then find their way onto the bill of materials for the building. Procurement teams will typically reference these performance standards in the RFP and bid documents and then review their invoice files to report on their compliance status.

So we are seeing a wide variety of users searching for products through ecolabel filters. By tracking the metadata on those searches, we can observe trends in the industry and within specific market segments and product categories.

During major trade shows and events, for example, we tend to see spikes in utilization. And within the special platforms that we curate for institutional building owners and operators, we can see how the hunt for compliant products can drive major projects and procurements.

Many of the ecolabels and certifications are evolving to include multiple attributes and scoring or ranking mechanisms to allow buyers to compare and analyze multiple options for their needs. We see that these multiattribute ecolabels will be the future of the industry. In fact, in response to this evolving vetting process and based on search data from category-specific platforms like level.ecomedes.com, we plan to release new tools before the end of the year that will deliver powerful product ranking and analysis tools to further support the needs of project and procurement teams.

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