The Home Depot as introduced a new program called “Eco Options” which attempts to identify environmentally products throughout its store. These products will clearly be labeled as part of the Eco Option program and will have less of an environmental impact than similar home improvement products beside them.

The Home Depot introduces its new Eco Options Evironmentally Friendly Products program

According to Home Depot:

Products with the Eco Options label are either eco friendly by definition, such as solar lights that use natural power, or have met certain environmental performance criteria verified by Scientific Certification Systems, an independent standards development and certification company. Eco Options products fall into one of five categories: clean air, water conservation, energy efficiency, healthy home and sustainable forestry.

While The Home Depot has been forwarding environmentally friendly policies for years (they use a lot of recycled materials in their stores and they changed their wood buying preferences to more responsible producers under pressure in 1999), this is the first large scale in-store promotion.

The Eco Options website has a lot of nice features, though not all of them work in every internet browser. It really gives Firefox some fits, so view the site with Internet Explorer. Each section of the Eco Option area has a few different calculators of various types you can use (calculating energy savings or fertilizer needed or something similar) and each area is filled with facts and, of course, products you can buy.

The Home Depot stores themselves will also continue to be environmentally friendly and all the stores will begin converting the majority of the bulbs they use to compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). The company will also plant thousands of trees in downtown Atlanta, GA to try to offset some of the emissions put out by its headquarters which is located there.

No word yet on a similar program from The Home Depot’s largest rival, Lowe’s, but you can almost certainly expect something soon.