UL Environment Buys Greenguard

For the second time in five months, UL Environment, a division of Underwriters Laboratories (UL), has acquired a major brand in the green building products certification field. Today it announced its purchase of the Greenguard indoor air quality certifications and the two organizations behind them. The announcement follows UL Environment’s August 2010 acquisition of Canada’s EcoLogo, one of the oldest eco-labels in the field (see “UL Environment Teams Up with EcoLogo”).

UL Environment’s acquisition of Greenguard accompanied its purchase of both Air Quality Sciences, Inc. (AQS) and the Greenguard Environmental Institute (GEI). AQS, founded in 1989, is a product emissions testing laboratory that launched the Greenguard label in 2000 as a way of recognizing products that AQS tested and found to have low emissions of indoor air pollutants. In 2001, AQS sought to give the Greenguard program more independence by creating the nonprofit GEI to run it.