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With more than 300 different organizations claiming to certify various products and services as Green or “sustainable,” industry leaders are pondering whether the time has come for a unified U.S. Green Product Council.

Leaders say that possible consumer confusion on just what constitutes “green” may be reason enough to consider a unified Green standard, reports Detroit News.

Consumers can’t be expected to verify the legitimacy of each and every Green certification system, said Steve Odland, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Office Depot Inc., who spoke June 16 at the National Summit session on Sustainable Business Solutions in Detroit.

“Maybe it’s time for a U.S. Green Product Council which could then take on the task of mapping all these various certifications,” he said, according to the article.

To Odland, it would make sense to divide such a standard into three levels of Greenness: light Green, Green and dark Green, reports the Detroit Free Press. Indeed, Office Depot is moving forward with just such a tiered rating system.

Fellow panelist Thomas Lyon, a professor and director of the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan, also is in favor of a common standard. “We’re getting a proliferation of labels and the average consumer can’t tell which label is better,” he said.

The Federal Trade Commission has taken up the subject of late. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has charged Kmart Corp., Tender Corp., and Dyna-E International with making false and unsubstantiated claims that their paper products were “biodegradable.”

In a June 9 hearing before the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection entitled “It’s Too Easy Being Green: Defining Fair Green Marketing Practices,” representatives from the FTC and other organizations spoke on the topic.