Sending market signals to companies

If you have the option to vote your values with your dollars by supporting companies and products that aligned with what is important to you - wouldn't you?  Unfortunately before it was very difficult for consumers to do this.  You might hear a cool story about a company that was using organic, recycling their waste or creating their own renewable energy and buy their products, but if you look at your everything you bought in a week - there are almost too many products to know everything about.

But now there is a really easy solution - especially for all of you smart phone users (I know, I know, I'll get one some day) It is call GoodGuide, and their tag line is "Find healthy, green, ethical products according to scientific ratings".  (check out the video on how it works)

If you look through the website you will see that products are rated at a high level on Health, Environment, and Society. Dig deeper and each category is broken down into sub categories, so depending on how much detail you want you can learn about why a product or company was ranked the way it was.

What is unique about GoodGuide is the level of scientific analysis that goes on behind each of the rankings, data is collected from a wide variety of sources and is analyzed to come up with the score.  You can only imagine the difficulty in acquiring all of this data. The data is then normalized across product categories so like with like is ranked against each other.

It is interesting to see the ranking and then your personal and emotional reaction to that ranking.  For instance I don't buy Clorox Green Works cleaning products because I felt Clorox was a bad company - but in fact their dish soap ranked well.  So that got me interested in how my current dish soap is ranked and interestingly it was only slightly higher.

If you want to get even more issue specific about how you purchase from companies who share your values here is a list of other ranking websites and the issues they look at. (Let me know if I am missing others)

Climate Counts - companies and their commitment to tackling global warming

Free 2 Work - Human Trafficking and Slavery 

PETA - List companies that test on animals

Newsweek - USA top 500 and 100 global companies

Better world hand book - (Human rights, the environment, animal protection, community involvement, social justice) Various consumer products

Greenpeace - Green guide to better electronics

So try it out - see how your toothpaste, laundry detergent, and favorite candy bar rank - see if you would make any changes to your buying habits based on this new information.