It’s been another action-packed day at FORTUNE’s Brainstorm Green conference on business and the environment. Lively conversation about the future of coal (it’s not going away), sustainable seafood (about which more another day), geoengineering and marketing to the green consumer.

The “green consumer” panel featured SC Johnson’s CEO H. Fisk Johnson, Steve Wenc of UL Environment and marketing guru Suzanne Shelton. It was moderated by my friend and colleague Joel Makower, the founder and editor-in-chief of GreenBiz. They all agreed that much of corporate America has moved ahead of its customers when it comes to embracing green products.

Wait, it gets worse: Joel and Suzanne argued that consumers fool themselves about their green behavior. They buy a CFL bulb or green cleaning product or perhaps a Prius and then decide they’ve done their part for the planet. They tell pollsters that they consider sustainability factors in their purchasing decisions and describe themselves as “conscious consumers” but the reality is quite different. They’re greenwashing their own behavior, Joel noted.

Is this bottle necessary?

Fisk told a story that illustrates this sometimes-depressing reality. SCJ has come up with a concentrated form of Windex that it sells in a small plastic pouch.  Customers can snip off the top of the pouch, pour  it into a refillable bottle and add water to get the equivalent of a 32-ounce bottle of Windex. The company saves money on packaging and energy, less carbon is emitted into the environment, less waste goes to landfill and a few pennies of savings can be passed along to the consumer. Everyone wins.

Everyone, that is, is the developing world where this Windex concentrate is sold. It’s not sold in the U.S., Fisk said, because Americans don’t care about saving a few pennies and they don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of mixing a small package of concentrate with water. They won’t make a small change that has a significant impact.

Aside from being lazy, consumers tend to be confused and habitual. They are confused by a plethora of eco-labels and competing claims.

“They consumer still does not understand what is green and what is not,” Fisk said.

Shoppers rely on the labels on products for information about sustainability, but they don’t trust the companies that make them, Suzanne said. They don’t have the time, the energy, the desire or focus to think about the consequences of their purchasing decisions.

“We just grab the same stuff off the shelf that we always grab off the shelf,” Suzanne said. “Where’s the moment where we can shift from automatic behavior to conscious choice?”

Discouraged by all this? Don’t be. Habitually modest but seriously green companies like SCJ are starting to talk more about their sustainability work. The company has to do so, Fisk said, to keep up with competitors like Clorox, Seventh Generation and Method. Better-educated consumers will be the result.

Besides that, objective guidance from third parties will help guide those consumers who care. UL Environment has begun to study consumer products. Good Guide is getting traction. The Sustainability Consortium is cranking up. All that will bring clarity to the question of which products are green. (See The Business of Rating Business.)

Finally, some very clever companies are going beyond education to reward consumers for greener behavior. Recyclebank is one. OPower is another. (See OPower, peer pressure and climate change.) Retailers like Walmart and Whole Foods are looking for ways nudge consumers towards better choices, or to make better choices for them.

In the end, it doesn’t take a majority of consumers to move a market, just a significant minority.

So remember how the song goes: The darkest hour is just before dawn.

Pity the shopper who wants to buy “green” paper or forest products.

They can choose products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) or by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).

Only the most dedicated deep-green consumer can be expected to understand the differences between the two.

And few know there’s a war of words going on between backers of the FSC and SFI.

Todd Paglia, executive director of the activist group Forest Ethics, says this about the SFI:

SFI is dangerous because it is a lie – it tells consumers that the product bearing the label is green when it isn’t.  SFI allows logging in old growth, logging in endangered species habitat, clearcut logging on landslide prone slopes above salmon streams….  In other words, business as usual with a “green” façade.

When industry is helping write the rules and set its own standards they will be high on rhetoric and extremely low on substance. That is SFI:  this is a fake eco-label of, by, and for the forest industry.

Not surprisingly, this kind of talk angers the folks at SFI–so much so that they  approached The New York Community Trust, a foundation that supports Forest Ethics, to complain. On its website SFI says:

ForestEthics continues to peddle pulp fiction about the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, repeating the same old inaccurate and misleading information.

With just 10 percent of the world’s forests certified to any certification standard, groups should work together to increase responsible forestry. Instead, ForestEthics spends energy and resources on well-funded attacks to discredit SFI, often citing outdated, incomplete, inaccurate or misleading information.

Such conflicts aren’t unique to the forest products industry, although the rhetoric here is unusually heated. Eco-labels are supposed to guide consumers to environmentally-friendly choices, but they have become so numerous–more than 300, by some estimates–and so confusing that consumers now need their own guides to eco-labels, like this Greener Choices website from Consumer Reports. Meanwhile, organizations that create standards have formed their own organization, called the ISEAL Alliance, to separate good standards from the not-so-good. It’s like a Good Housekeeping seal for other seals. With words like “natural” and “sustainable” and “green” being thrown around, it’s likely that some consumers just give up trying to figure out which claims are meaningful and which are not.

Graphic courtesy of TreeHugger.com

In the forestry wars, Forest Ethics announced a victory yesterday (3-28-2011): Seven companies, including four from the FORTUNE 500–Aetna, Allstate, Office Depot and Symantec–said they would phase out their use of the SFI label.

The company on that list that caught my eye was Office Depot because I know the company’s sustainability chief, Yalmaz Siddiqui, is a thoughtful and dedicated sustainability advocate. (See Radical Transparency at Office Depot.)

When I called Yalmaz, he told me: “We’ve really had to struggle with the question of, when is a product green?” To the average consumer, he said, an eco-label signals that a product has gone beyond the norm. SFI has become the norm. “In North America, the vast majority of the mainstream providers of paper products have got SFI certification,” he said. In one sense, the SFI standard has become a victim of its success. That’s particularly true because, according to a hierarchy established by Office Depot–in which papers are ranked as dark green, mid-green and light green– recycled paper is favored over even sustainably harvested virgin paper. SFI doesn’t even qualify as light green, but instead gets a rating of “meets industry environmental norms.”

This isn’t to say that SFI doesn’t do good work, particularly with small-scale, family-owned foresters. SFI program participants have, among other things, invested over $ 1.1 billion in forest research, and over $55 million to support community programs such as education and training for 120,000 loggers and foresters, the organization says.

But there are good reasons to trust FSC, and some to be suspicious of SFI. Here are a few:

History: The FSC was started in 1993 by environmentalists, while SFI was formed a year later by the North American forest products industry. It didn’t fully separate from the American Forest and Paper Association until 2007 and, even now, the CEOs of several big forestry companies sit on its board. To be fair, so do six board members from environmental groups including Resources for the Future and The Conservation Fund.

The LEED brouhaha: A long battle involved lots of lobbying about whether to provide points for SFI-certified wood  under the widely-accepted LEED standards for green buildings ended with a decision that did not favor SFI. According to The New York Times Green blog, NGOs including the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace opposed granting favorable treatment to SFI.

Conflicts of interest:  SFI today gives its seal of approval or ‘certification’ to activities on more than 160 million acres of forests or tree plantations all across North America. Virtually all of SFI’s funding comes from the companies that own or manage these lands, according to Forest Ethics. Unfortunately, the same thing is true of many certification systems, including FSC–they take money from the companies they audit.

How to resolve knotty questions (couldn’t resist!) like these is by no means clear. Perhaps independent ratings systems–like Good Guide, the Sustainability Consortium or UL Environment–will  bring clarity to the debate about what products are environmentally preferable. Maybe responsible retailers should take on the job, as Office Depot seems to be doing. Or maybe consumers will learn to trust only those seals that have earned their own seals of approval, as crazy as that sounds.

“The Power of One” is a series of stories about people who have helped to make their companies more sustainable. They can’t do it alone, of course. But by coming up with a good idea, enlisting the help of others and making persuasive arguments, one person can change a company and, sometimes, even an industry. The story of how Chuck Gerhardt helped create a new business for Underwriters Laboratories, the product safety certification organization that dates back to the 19th century,  begins with an email.

Chuck Gerhardt

“First, I’m not a tree hugger,” the email began. “As you know, I’m a corn-fed Midwesterner who is surprised that he is even thinking ‘green.’ However I do value the environment and all it has to offer.”

It was July 29, 2003, when Chuck Gerhardt, a facilities manager at the Santa Clara office of Underwriters Laboratories, sent an email about what he described as “a thought rummaging around my head lately.” Chuck, who is 43 and has worked for UL for 25 years, isn’t an engineer or an MBA. “I’m just a working stiff”  with a high school education and a little bit of community college, he tells me. But it struck him that UL, a global organization that has become the most trusted name in product safety, might expand to become an arbiter of what’s green, and what’s not.

As he wrote:

Has UL put much thought into the “Green” or “Sustainable” arena? In my simple thinking I see the standard UL mark on a lamp cord but I also see another lamp next to it that has a UL mark but this one has a little green leaf meaning it not only should be safe but it has been manufactured by a company that has a LEED rating on their facility, (More about LEED in a minute) and if the company doesn’t have a LEED rating on their facility maybe they manufacture their products in an environmentally sound way. So, I buy the lamp with the green leaf because I want to help the environment. Since UL promotes public safety this seems to all kind of fit together.

The thought running that was running around Chuck’s head is today a real business. UL Environment , which calls itself a “full-service environmental solutions company,” offers independent green claims validation, product certification, training, advisory services and standards development. It’s got close to 60 employees, based all over the world, and it expects to certify products in 12 to 15 categories by the end of 2011. There’s no “little green leaf” — not yet, anyway.

Turning the email into a real business wasn’t easy, it turns out.

While Chuck is too much of a company man to say so, that first email was pretty much ignored. He followed up with another, and talked to people he knew inside UL. For several years, he didn’t get anywhere. But he didn’t get discouraged either. “It would die off a little in my mind, and I wouldn’t pursue it,” he says. “But I always felt it was a good idea.”

His instincts were reinforced by a couple of experiences that he had. He went to a seminar at Stanford University one day, and heard an executive with Diversey, a company that makes cleaning products, say that a third-party sustainability standard was needed to help customers tell “green” products from others. He went shopping for a mattress for one of his kids, and saw that UL had certified mattresses as safe–but there was no reliable way to tell what chemicals were inside. “I wanted to know what options I had,” Chuck said. He ended up buying “all natural” mattresses, but thought the process should have been easier. (See my 2009 post, A new green sheriff in town, which makes a reference to this purchase, without naming Chuck.)

Marcello Manca

Not until 2006–when a senior executive at UL introduced Chuck by email to Marcello Manca–did the project start to get some traction. A native of Italy who was educated in the U.S., Marcello was then in charge of new business development for UL. He had  thought about the idea of environmental certification, but wasn’t sure the time was right. “Nondum matura est,” he says, quoting a Latin phrase meaning that it wasn’t quite ripe. Chuck’s passion helped put the idea into play, as did the explosive growth of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), a voluntary standard for buildings.  “The green building movement was the right spark,” Marcello says.

What followed was a more rigorous analysis of the market for green certification, the drafting of a business plan and ultimately a presentation to UL’s board. By then, Marcello had become so excited by the potential of UL Environment that he left his business development job to become its first vice president and general manager. For his part, Chuck has moved from the Santa Clara office to UL’s Chicago headquarters where he is now an employee of UL Environment, focusing on the company’s internal sustainability work.

Chuck says the keep to making change inside UL was “finding the right champion” and “being persistent.” He also learned to “keep refining the message so it’s able to speak to people at the top. The people running the company speak a different language from people in day-to-day operations,” he says.

Marcello says much the same thing. “It’s great to have passion and and it’s great to have persistence. Everything starts with those elements but once you start to run an idea up the flagpole, the hard analysis, the due diligence is what pays dividends. Ask a lot of questions. Talk to a lot of people. Get industry feedback. Get customer feedback.”

What Chuck and Marcello accomplished was really hard–getting an entirely new business launched inside a well-established organization. Timing was key–it’s possible to be too early with an idea, as well as too late. But the blend of passion, persistence and analysis they brought to the task is required to drive any kind of meaningful corporate change.

Tomorrow’s Power of One will look at how thinking outside (and inside) the box drove innovation at eBay.

Is Coca Cola a more sustainable company than PepsiCo? Which company is greener, Dell or Hewlett Packard? Both UPS and FedEx say they are environmental leaders—who’s right?

Underwriters Laboratories (UL) — one of the world’s oldest and most respected standard-setting organizations — is going to help settle some of those arguments.

In cooperation with Greener World Media – the publisher of Greenbiz.com, where I’m a senior writer — UL plans to launch a ratings system for companies by the end of the year. This is a big deal because it could help bring credibility and clarity to the very crowded and confused business of sustainability ratings, rankings and eco-labels.

The news that Greener World Media and UL are working together on a sustainability standard surfaced last week when Marcello Manca, the vice president and general manager of UL Environment, spoke on a panel at the Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency convened by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). At the same time, my friend Joel Makower, the founder of Greener World Media, wrote a detailed blogpost, explaining the origins of the project, which go back to the early 2000s.  Joel calls the new venture “LEED for companies,” saying:

We’ve long described this in shorthand as “LEED for Companies” — that is, a point-based rating system along with good-better-best levels of certification. We have been inspired by the success of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED green building rating systems, which created definitions of “green building” where there were none. Those ratings systems were critical catalysts in spurring the green-building market. Similarly, we believe this new standard and rating system will help define sustainability at the enterprise level, growing markets for certified companies.

If all goes according to plan, the new ratings system will rise above the crowd because it combines the knowledge and networks of Joel and Rory Bakke, director of sustainability at Greener World Media, who has worked extensively with government purchasing agencies, with the brand and credibility of UL, a global nonprofit that has been ratings products for safety for more than 115 years. UL has 6,700 employees and 65,000 customers around the world.

The UL-Greener World Media product–it doesn’t have a name yet–could also complement the data on products being compiled by the Sustainability Consortium organized by Wal-Mart, whose members now include retailers Safeway and Best Buy, and consumer products giants P&G, Disney, General Mills, PepsiCo, S.C. Johnson and Unilever. Jon Johnson, co-director of the consortium, was also at the GRI panel, and he said that UL’s company ratings would be a good fit with the consortium’s product data.  “Walmart has reached out to ULE,” Johnson said.

For  now, the business of rating and ranking products and companies around sustainability is an ungodly mess–although not for lack of efforts. Media companies such as Newsweek and CRO Magazine have tried to rank the greenest, most sustainable or responsible companies but their efforts have generated as much derision as respect. (See 100 Best Corporate Citizens? What a CROck!) A startup called Good Guide that rates products on health, environmental and social criteria has won adherents but also criticism from corporations. Claus Conzelmann of Nestle complained at the GRI event that Good Guide doesn’t have enough specific product data–Nestle alone makes 100,000 different products–to do a reliable job, calling some of its ratings “grossly misleading.” Socially responsible mutual funds and financial indexes like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index rank companies, but most don’t make their standards or criteria public. Most recently, Fast Company magazine online has  published “sustainability faceoffs” (they should have called them “sustainability smackdowns”) comparing Apple to  Microsoft, McDonald’s to  Starbucks, and Coke to Pepsi, using data and methodology from a book called The HIP Investor. (See How to be a HIP investor.)

Allen White of the Tellus Institute,  a co-founder of GRI, said: “The quantity of information is exploding. Is the quality keeping up? Is the usability there?…It does, at times, become very confusing, overwhelming.”

Marcello Manca

Many details of the UL-Greener World Media approach remain to be determined. The companies have begun talking  with companies and NGOs about their approach, which will combine, as Joel indicated, a point system with good-better-best ratings, mostly likely giving companies a silver, gold or platinum seal, or no rating at all, meaning they have work to do.

The ratings will go beyond “green.” Said Manca: “We’re looking at governance. We’re looking at workplace. We’re looking at supply chain. We’re looking at community engagement. It’s a holistic approach, and it’s all based on verifiable data.”

Several questions remain:

Will the results be made public? “This is still under discussion,” Manca said. “Our strong desire is that all of our clients will accept full disclosure.” If companies resist, UL and Greener World Media will be in a tough spot–they intend to make money by charging the companies that will be rated.

Why would companies pay for ratings? Partly because they want  third-party snapshot of their sustainability performance but mostly because their customers — Walmart, other retailers, governments — will insist that they get rated.

Isn’t it a conflict of interest for companies to pay for their own ratings? The evidence is mixed. Bond-rating agencies Moody’s and Standard & Poors did a dismal job rating financial products, giving AAA ratings to bonds that turned out to be junk because they wanted the business. But UL’s safety ratings are respected even though they are paid for by the companies.

I can’t be objective about the UL-Greener World Media venture, not only because I work closely with Greenbiz but also because I have so much respect for Joel and his colleagues. I like to tease Joel that he’s the “guru of green business” (AP once called him that) but the truth is that he has thought more about this set of issues than anyone I know. So I’m betting that the UL-Greener World Media will bring clarity, rather than clutter, to the business of rating business.

Coca Cola Enterprises claims its aluminum cans contain more than 50% recycled content.

Clorox claims its Greenworks all-purpose cleaner is made with plant and mineral-based ingredients.

And GE claims its compact fluorescent lightbulbs use up to 75% less energy and last up to 10 times longer than standard bulbs.

How do we know that those claims are true?

The fact is, we don’t. My experience tells me that the risk of exposure and embarrassment is enough to deter any big brand-name company from lying about the environmental attributes of its products. But there’s lying, and then there’s telling a selective truth or merely leaving out inconvenient facts.

What we need is a reliable, independent and trusted source to analyze such claims, the way websites like Politifact separates truth from fiction in the political arena. One organization that could emerge as a standard-setter, fact-checker, product-tester and verifier has been around for more than a century—Underwriters Laboratories. These are the people who test thousands of products to make sure they meet strict safety standards. Last month, Underwriters Laboratories launched a new subsidiary called UL Environment. It’s intended to help industry and the public make sense of the “green” claims that are flooding the marketplace.

Think of UL Environment as the new green sheriff in town.

“There’s a lot of greenwashing out there,” says Marcello Manca, who is vice president and general manager of UL Environment Inc. “We want to get rid of some of the confusion.”

I spoke by phone with Marcello, who’s based in Milan, Italy. He’s an Italian who got an engineering degree from the University of Nevada, spent 13 years working in Nevada and California, and then returned home to Italy. The president of UL Environment is Steve Wenc, a Chicago native now based in Geneva. UL has 66 offices, clients in 104 countries, 127 inspection centers and it employs about 5,000 engineers, scientists, chemists and technicians. A nonprofit that oversees a group of for-profit subsidiaries. UL is paid by the manufacturers of the products it tests and certifies.

Marcello told me that UL Enviromnent initially plans to focus on two categories, building materials and consumer goods. The company intend to begin by verifying environmental claims about energy, water use and recycled content.

“One of our employees recently purchased an all-natural mattress for his newborn child because he didn’t want his son to be exposed to chemicals,” Marcello told me. But because manufacturers of products ranging from household cleansers to children’s toys are not now required to disclose their ingredients, claims like “all-natural” are hard for consumers to verify.

UL Environment also hopes to establish standards for sustainable products, working in an open and transparent manner with manufacturers, retailers and NGOs. This, too, will require the cooperation, and financial support, of manufacturers, many of whom are existing UL clients.

“We’re taking a very pragmatic approach,” Marcello says. “Our intention is not to make the world perfectly green from the outset. We know that’s Mission Impossible.”

Finally—and this gets really interesting—UL Environment would like to take a broad look at company operations. So, for example, if a product claiming to be “green” is made by a supplier in China who pollutes a nearby river or the air, UL Environment could decide that the product failed to meet its standards.

“There is a school of thought that says that you cannot build a green product unless you are a green company, too,” Marcello says.

What’s intriguing about all this is that standards are enormously important to business. Think about how the organic standard has affected the food industry. Or how the Energy Star rating has driven appliance-makers to sell more efficient dishwashers or refrigerators. Or consider the impact of the LEED building standards on the real estate industry. An array of sustainability standards has the potential to drive green business practices deep into the economy.

Of course, that makes it sound simple, and it’s not. Devising standards and getting them recognized is a long and complex process, requiring value judgments. As my friend Joel Makower is fond of asking, “How green is green enough?”

What’s more, Marcello says: “Doing it right is expensive. Doing it right takes a lot of passion.”

UL Environment will have to convince manufacturers, retailers and consumers in the midst of a global recession to invest in environmental claims verification and sustainability standards. It won’t be easy. But it will worth watching closely.