Whose Sustainability?
by Ian Parnell, October 8, 2007
The current rush to meet green goals has created such a confusion of competing and overlapping sustainability standards that in some economic sectors it’s difficult to decide whose version of sustainability to follow. Well, according to this article, in the US at least, overarching national standards for sustainable agriculture may finally be set by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS).
SCS, an independent third party ‘certification agency’, has prepared a draft set of national standards for sustainable agriculture that have been accepted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). ANSI is a private non-profit organization that administers and coordinates US voluntary standardization and conformity assessment system as the official US representative to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It engages in accrediting programs that assess conformance to standards such as the ISO 9000 (quality) and ISO 14000 (environmental) management systems. (ANSI's Canadian counterpart is the Standards Council of Canada). Why did SCS develop its own sustainable agriculture standards? More...
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