Ask a company what their product is and you will get an answer in seconds. Ask what it costs the earth and the room changes. You get a question back: why are you asking, which details, which region, which standard, is this a requirement or a preference — or you get nothing at all.
This station holds one question and refuses to close it. Not a guidance note, not a framework, not a maturity model — an open inquiry, kept in public, revised as the world catches up with it.
The honest position in 2025 is that most products on earth cannot answer. Not because the makers are hiding, and not because the question is wrong. The measurement apparatus is younger than the products it is asked about. Supply chains are longer than the data that describes them. And for most goods, in most markets, nobody has yet been legally obliged to know.
Sometimes a question goes unanswered not because it is the wrong question — it just needs time. And sometimes the point is not to answer it, but to keep living as long as the question keeps growing.
Those who learn to answer early tend to keep selling. That is the whole thesis, and it is testable — which is why this page is dated, sourced and left open.
You asked for a percentage: how many products, how many companies, can answer. Here is the truthful state of that number. There is no global register of products, no denominator. Any single figure you see quoted is a survey of a sample, in one sector, in one region, in one year. So this station publishes the shape of the gap instead of a false precision, and lists below exactly which registers do exist and can be counted.
No global denominator exists. There is no worldwide product register to divide by. Countable proxies: verified EPD programmes, EU energy‑label registrations, ecolabel licences. [18][02][32]
Reported only through voluntary disclosure samples, which are self‑selecting: the firms that answer surveys are the firms that can answer. [29][30]
Three hard registers: EU energy‑label product entries (EPREL), substances of concern in articles (ECHA SCIP), and verified environmental product declarations. Everything else is estimate. [02][09][18]
The answer is not distributed by company size or goodwill. It is distributed by obligation. Where a regulator has already asked, the answer exists and is public. Where nobody has asked, it usually does not exist at all.
Half of the silence is definitional. The asker and the asked are often not discussing the same object. A usable answer names its scope, its method and its verifier — otherwise it is a colour, not a number.
Cradle‑to‑gate or cradle‑to‑grave, modelled to ISO 14040/14044 with a declared functional unit. [14][20]
kg CO₂e per functional unit, ISO 14067 or the GHG Protocol Product Standard, with the boundary stated. [14][16]
ISO 14025 type III, third‑party verified, published in a programme register anyone can check. [18]
Declarable substances, recycled content, critical raw materials — the data trail behind any circularity claim. [09][17]
Repairability, spare‑part availability, disassembly, expected lifetime — the parameters ecodesign rules will fix. [01]
The carrier: a machine‑readable digital product passport, attached to the item, readable at the border and at the till. [01][12]
Ecodesign delegated acts for the first priority product groups move from consultation to law, and the first digital product passport requirements are specified. Battery carbon‑footprint declarations phase in. The carbon border mechanism leaves its reporting phase and starts charging.
Risk if silent: quotes lose points in EU public and corporate tenders. [01][04][06]Large‑company sustainability reporting is mature enough that buyers stop asking suppliers politely. Product‑level data becomes a condition of the purchase order, pushed down the chain by customers who must report it themselves.
Risk if silent: de‑listing by retailers and OEMs — commercial, not legal. [05]Passports, recycled‑content thresholds and repairability rules cover a wide slice of goods sold in the EU. North American disclosure regimes — California first — have run several cycles, and unverifiable green claims are a legal liability rather than a marketing risk.
Risk if silent: no market access. The product simply cannot be placed. [01][08][22][21]The question inverts. An eco‑profile is no longer a differentiator; its absence is the anomaly. Products without a data identity are traded like undocumented goods — cheaper, narrower, and shrinking.
Risk if silent: the product outlives its market by a decade at most. [19][33]Ecodesign and packaging rules are placing‑on‑the‑market conditions. There is no fine to weigh against margin — the goods do not enter.
Where embedded emissions are unverified, default values apply, and defaults are conservative. Not knowing your number means paying someone else’s.
Every customer obliged to report their own value chain will ask you first and replace you second. This arrives earlier than the law does.
Unsubstantiated environmental claims move from reputational risk to enforcement — advertising authorities, consumer law, and securities regulators alike.
Primary legal texts and official registers, so anything on this page can be checked against its origin rather than against this page. Numbering is stable; entries are added as the research continues.
Open, ongoing, and deliberately unfinished — running from here to 2030. Each revision adds sectors, adds registers, and replaces an estimate with a source. If your product can answer the question, that answer belongs in the ledger. If it cannot yet, that belongs here too.
Ledger open · contributions logged by revision