The AISE Code of good environmental practice for household laundry detergents is the European Soap & Detergent Industry's response to the European Commission's Fifth Environmental Action Programme. It is based on 4 specific measurable targets to be accomplished by manufacturers committing to this Code on a European level and over a five-year period (1997-2001, using 1996 as reference year).

As requested in the EC Recommendation° on this initiative, AISE is committed to report progress against the targets at least every two years with a final report after the five-year period ; for this purpose, AISE appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) as an independent body to collect and verify these data. The 1996 baseline report forms the basis of this performance monitoring.

The data collection is split in two parts : data for Consumption, Packaging and Poorly Biodegradable Organics (PBO's) targets, to be collected at company level via each National Association (PwC responsible); data for the energy target to be gathered centrally (AISE responsible) .

Some guidelines were developed by PwC to ensure coherence in the data collection process amongst countries and companies, providing definitions, elementary process phases and some basic principles (such as transparency, consistency through time and product lines) to be respected by Companies and National Associations.

In order to ensure the validity of the process used to generate the declared data, PwC audits regularly a representative sample of companies committed to the Code (c.a. 60% of the declared figures).

The energy target criteria is calculated by the agglomeration of data on consumer washing habits gathered for AISE by a leading market survey company (Taylor Nelson AGB), and energy consumption data of washing machines provided by CECED°°.

In total, more than 180 companies in the 18 countries have committed to the Code through their National Association, representing more than 90% of the market.

Click here to obtain the latest information concerning data reporting (1999/2000) [R1]