# Drivers, Barriers and Benefits of the EU Ecolabel in European Companies' Perception
## EU Ecolabel Drivers, Benefits and Barriers: Evidence from the EU Ecolabel Evaluation Survey
### Barriers  
Our study also provided a picture of the problems and difficulties that companies encounter, or may encounter, when applying and holding an EU Ecolabel licence and that could prevent them fromapplying. Results demonstrate that a series of important barriers still exist (Figure 8). In Licence holders' view, these are the following: too much documentation/red tape required, lack of external incentives (including fiscal incentives and access to public procurement) and lack of competitive rewards and advantages. Please note that, for this question, it has been asked whether the respondent agreed or disagreed with a range of statements (values from 0 to 5). Figure 7: SME (**right**) and Larger (**left**) License holder responses to the consideration of the benefits gained. License holders believe that the required documentation is too much and complicated and this is highlighted as a major difficulty. As emerging from a significant number of interviews that have complemented the survey, this translates into a very time--and resource--consuming process of obtaining an EU Ecolabel licence. If compared to the results of previous evaluation study (EVER, 2006), these results seem to be coherent with License holders' answers back in 2006 where documentation (too much, too complex, and not always easy to collect when dealing with suppliers) and cost of implementation were reported as major barriers. Companies still perceive bureaucracy as a major problem and ask for streamlined assessment and verification procedures. As for the \"lack of external incentives\", this can be paired with the \"lack of recognition by public institutions\". Companies show a rather high agreement on the lack of institutional support and recognition as the survey and interviews reveal that they believe public institutions should incentivize and support the EU Ecolabel by means of fiscal and regulatory relief measures, i.e., easier access to public procurement, tax reduction, simplifications of permitting procedures, etc. As for the \"lack of competitive rewards and advantages\", this emerges as closely linked to the lack of tailor-made external incentives for rewarding companies that propose more environmentally friendly products to the market. It is interesting to note that, while companies indicated improved competitiveness and better market positioning as the main benefits deriving from holding an EU Ecolabel license, at the same time, they declare that they experienced an insufficient market response. This may suggest that, even if the EU Ecolabel brings some market benefits, they are lower than those expected by companies applying for the EU Ecolabel. The surveyed companies perceive this barrier as mainly linked to the lack of awareness of the EU Ecolabel by consumers and to the insufficient and inadequate promotion of the Scheme by public institutions and the EU. As it emerged from some interviews, though, this perception may also be linked to the fact that Licence holders do not systematically collect data on sales of EU Ecolabel products. A general outcome of the interviews we carried out in our study is that there is a generalised  
Figure 8: Licence holder (**right**) and Non-License holder (**left**) responses to the consideration of barriers to use the EU Ecolabel. lack of information on the effective market performance of EU Ecolabel products. As for the cost of adoption, it is not perceived as a prominent barrier. Surprisingly, the survey results show that companies do not suggest (or ask) to reduce the administrative costs for participants (e.g., reducing the costs of license and new fee structures) as a way to lower the barriers for the EU Ecolabel. However, it should be noted that the cost of complying with criteria (e.g., cost of testing activities) ranks high in survey results, so this is still perceived as a barrier to the EU Ecolabel by companies.