Environmental labelling in China has developed into a complete system encompassing standards, certification, assessment and quality assurance. Environment-labelled products cover the automotive, building materials, textiles, electronics, daily chemicals, furniture and packaging industries. Products of over 30,000 specifications produced by some 1,500 enterprises have now passed environmental labelling certification.

China has made enormous progress in its economic development, but its economic structure remains irrational, without any fundamental change to the haphazard mode of economic growth, said Vice Minister of Environmental Protection Wu Xiaoqing. Resource and energy consumption and the deterioration of the ecological environment have become bottlenecks and obstacles to sustainable economic and social development. In order to achieve harmonised development of the environment and the economy, the government has made the building of a resource-efficient and environmentally-friendly society its goal and embarked on the road of sustainable development by initiating changes to the existing mode of production and way of life.

The Chinese authorities are taking proactive steps to promote sustainable consumption by adopting new government procurement procedures. After announcing its policy for procuring energy-efficient products in 2004, the government promulgated the Suggestions on the Implementation of Government Procurement of Environment-Labelled Products and published procurement checklists in 2006, requiring government departments to give priority to energy-efficient and environment-labelled products in their procurement. The State Council decided to make the procurement of energy-efficient products mandatory in a further bid to promote energy conservation and environmental protection in 2007.

On the sustainable consumption front, China launched the government green procurement scheme in 2006. The Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Environmental Protection have so far announced two green procurement checklists covering 14 product categories from 444 enterprises. China environmental labelling certification provides important technical support for the government's green procurement efforts. So far, 65 categories of products have been certified. China has signed agreements of cooperation and mutual assistance in environmental labelling with countries like Germany, Scandinavia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand.