ABSTRACT
The proliferation of environmental product information schemes (EPIS) has included a great variety of different EPIS. Efforts have been made to classify existing EPIS according to their application status and general characteristics of labels such as format, multi-stakeholder approach, and International Organisation for Standardisation typology. From an analytical perspective, EPIS can be distinguished in several phases: the establishment phase, including institutionalisation of the scheme, selection of products and elaboration of criteria; the market phase, considering both the supply and the demand side; and a monitoring phase. This chapter provides some background information on the state of the art regarding the monitoring and assessment phase. For all EPIS the institutionalisation phase lays the foundation stone. The institutionalisation of mandatory EPIS takes place in politics. Voluntary EPIS in particular are confronted with the problem of acceptance of their criteria by potential applicants and, furthermore, the impacts that labelled products have on the market in terms of their relative market share.
