By Peter Gerhardt They exist for wood, paper, palm oil or cod: sustainability labels. All too often, these have been launched with great fanfare for a better world, only to realise soberly soon after that overexploitation and environmental destruction simply continue. This could be due to the fact that many of these voluntary certification initiatives have a few fundamental flaws built in. The hope is that politics, business and associations will learn from past mistakes and question eco-labels with scepticism. This is particularly true with regard to the current bioeconomy debate, regarding the transformation of our economy from fossil to biological. Here, too, the call for eco-certificates is getting louder. Already today, the planet is exhausted by the biomass we demand from it: This leads to overfished oceans for Captain Iglo and destroyed rainforests for three-euro chicken. If fossil raw materials are to be completely replaced by biomass in the future, the question consequently arises on which earth this biomass should grow on, or which environmental crimes or human rights violations we might want to …