Anthony Minite, President, Bentley Prince Street, Inc.
After reflecting on our first big trade show of the year, I think we all need to come clean about sustainability. It seems every manufacturer is claiming to be the leader in sustainability and backing it up with huge advertising and marketing campaigns. It’s time to talk about making an honest commitment to sustainability. You can talk all you want and blast it on the biggest billboards and in the glossiest magazines, but without proof, it’s all just talk.
Since Bentley Prince Street is committed to responsible manufacturing, we have nothing to hide and see no need to confuse the marketplace with an inundation of green claims and labels. For this reason, we provide third-party verification of our sustainability claims with Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs). An EPD is a statement of product ingredients and environmental impacts that happen during the manufacturing process and life of a product. Similar to ingredient and nutrition labels on food, an EPD gives full disclosure of product ingredients, use of energy and material resources and environmental impacts throughout the life cycle of a product.
This is about the ingredients that make Bentley Prince Street products. It’s about honesty and integrity and what we are putting into the marketplace. We are on track to complete EPDs on 100% of our manufactured products this year. It takes a company-wide commitment by all our associates to accomplish this and it’s not easy. If it were easy, all our competitors would be doing it. And they are not.
Join us in our movement for honesty in manufacturing, by demanding third-party proof from the manufacturers you work with. We are going out there with our EPDs to get everybody on board to start specifying products that are EPD certified by a third-party. My hope is that all manufacturers will now be held to the same standard that Bentley Prince Street wants to be held to.
I challenge you to ask for proof and if you run into me, ask me about EPDs. I have nothing to hide.