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The Blue Angel (Der Blaue Engel) is a German certification for products and services that have environmentally friendly aspects.
It has been awarded since 1978 by the Jury Umweltzeichen, a group of 13 people from environment and consumer protection groups, industry, unions, trade, media and churches.
Blue Angel is the oldest ecolabel in the world, and it covers some 10,000 products in some 80 product categories.
After the introduction of Germany’s Blue Angel in 1978 as the first worldwide environmental label, other European and non-European countries followed this example and introduced their own national and supra-regional environmental labels. The common goal of these labels is to inform consumers about environmentally friendly products thereby giving global support to product-related environmental protection.
In 1994, some countries cooperated in developing the Global Ecolabelling Network (GEN) - a non-profit interest group composed of ecolabel organisations throughout the world.