Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index and GoodGuide are two interesting systems to study.
Two months ago, Wal-Mart made an announcement that could set off an ecological earthquake: The giant retailer disclosed it was cooperating with an academic consortium to develop a sustainability index for rating its hundreds of thousands of products.
Just weeks after Wal-Mart’s announcement, the Harvard Business Review featured a cover story proclaiming that sustainability has become the key to successful corporate strategy. The article, co-authored by the University of Michigan-based strategy maven C.K. Prahalad, proclaimed that the next business model must be green and touted ecological innovation as the coming driver of economic growth.
Wal-Mart has handed the environmental movement a new tool for ameliorating the human footprint: using an emerging generation of information systems to create market pressures to upgrade the ecological performance of commerce and industry. This strategy entails making life-cycle-assessment data for products transparent — that is, labeling them with a sound, independent rating so shoppers can easily take the ecological impacts into account as they decide what to buy.
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A prototype for just such a sustainability index is already in operation: GoodGuide.com, launched earlier this year, aggregates more than 200 databases — from the global warming evaluations of companies compiled by ClimateCounts, to government listings of toxic chemicals — into a single rating on a 10-point scale.
The advantage of an all-in-one rating is this: say you’re buying a wood product that has won Forest Stewardship Council approval — but you also want to know how it rates on chemicals of concern, how workers are treated, and its carbon footprint. GoodGuide, developed by a team led by industrial ecologist Dara O’Rourke of the University of California at Berkeley, tells you all that, and much more — either in a single summative score (on a 1 to 10 scale), or broken down into sub-ratings in environmental, health, and social categories — and, if you’re determined to dig down to details, with transparency about how the ratings were arrived at. So far GoodGuide rates 70,000 or so individual products, with more in the pipeline
via Green Intelligence: Toward True Ecological Transparency by Daniel Goleman: Yale Environment 360.
“Can we all govern?” the movie asks at the outset. (It can, of course, be viewed on the Web.)
