12.1.a Market share of products certified by a state sustainability standard
The indicator reflects the market share of products that either carry the highest EU Energy Label within their product class or are certified with one of the following environmental labels: the EU Ecolabel, the Euro-leaf organic logo, the German Blue Angel, or the Green Button. While the EU Energy Label primarily addresses energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, the other four environmental labels also take additional environmental aspects into account, such as pesticide use or pollution from hazardous wastewater.
The aim of the indicator is to show the extent to which environmentally friendly product alternatives are replacing conventional products in the market. Only a selection of product groups is considered, partly due to limited data availability on the sales of sustainability-certified products. This also helps to avoid double counting.
The data are compiled by the German Environment Agency (UBA), which draws on a range of sources, including data from the Consumer Research Institute. Comparability over time is limited: the product group “clothing” has only been included in the indicator since 2020, and changes to the EU Energy Label classification system have also affected comparability. The efficiency classes, which ranged from A+++ to G until 2020, were reset to the original A to G scale in 2021 for several product categories.
The indicator covers the consumption areas of housing, mobility, clothing, and food. It includes household appliances such as refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, and air conditioners, as well as lighting products, food, hygiene paper, cleaning and laundry detergents, and passenger vehicles. As the market size of each product group varies significantly, the market shares of products with official environmental labels are weighted by their respective sales volume.
Due to this weighting, food has the greatest influence on the indicator: around 60 % of the indicator value is determined by the share of organic food. Approximately 24 % comes from sustainable passenger cars, and 12 % from the clothing product group.
Weighting by the environmental relevance of each product group is not feasible, as the environmental labels address different impact categories (e.g. energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, material use) which cannot be aggregated. A comprehensive ecological assessment – such as an environmental footprint – is therefore not possible.
The indicator captures the proportion of newly placed products on the market relative to the overall market. Behavioural changes resulting from more efficient products, such as increased consumption (the so-called rebound effect), are not accounted for. Since the indicator is based on sales data, it cannot reflect the actual number of units sold due to price differences between conventional and certified products. Changes in the indicator value may therefore also result from price developments within individual product groups.
In 2022, expenditure on products with official sustainability labels totalled 49.9 billion euros – equivalent to 12.2 % of the total sales of the product groups considered. In 2012, this share was just 3.6 %. After a 4.1 percentage point increase in 2020 compared to the previous year, the indicator value declined by 1.1 percentage points in 2022 compared to 2021, remaining only slightly above the 2020 level. If recent trends continue, the politically defined target of increasing the market share to at least 34 % by 2030 is unlikely to be achieved.
The rise in 2020 was mainly driven by a sharp increase in the market share of A+-labelled passenger cars, which rose from 10.0 % to 27.5 % due to government incentives. In 2022, this share had increased further to 31.2 %. The market share of organic food was 6.3 % in 2022, below the previous peak of 7.0 % in 2021. Clothing reached only a 0.2 % market share in 2022.
In some other product groups, the market share of certified products is significantly higher – for example, washing machines (96 %), light sources (76 %), cooker hoods (60 %), and tumble dryers (58 %). However, due to the relatively small sales volume of these product groups compared to the overall market, their high market shares have only a minor effect on the overall indicator.
The inclusion of the clothing category with the "Green Button" label in 2020 has had a relatively strong influence on comparability before and after 2020 due to its high weighting factor. Without considering the clothing sector, the indicator value for 2022 would have been approximately 14 %.
