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.

Wall Street and Sustainability

So it isn't any surprise to any of you who are interested in sustainability to know that the objectives of corporations and wall street don't usually include environmental and social unless it benefits the bottom line.
Avoiding risk is an easy sell for either, reducing costs helps on the environmental front and improving workplace moral and security benefits productivity. Social and environmental are almost always linked into their financial siblings success.

The interesting part about this is that we are chasing our tails and are too disconnected from our impacts to truly understand how we can manage environmental and social to our benefits.
Chasing our tail because there is a desire to make the company financially stable and then help the planet and its occupants, but then we are hurting before helping and growing in a way that builds bad habits. And we know all habits are hard to break.
Disconnected because we have no control when environmental destruction floods out the crops we rely on to make our products, or when poverty becomes too much and disease prevents workers getting to work, thus losing our delivered on time products.
Despite the world becoming so ever intertwined we have also become so fragmented into different cogs of different wheels.
Big companies are starting to invest themselves all the way through their supply chains to avert risks, and when they get down to the parts they never imagined many are having to adress the social and environmental ills they caused head on. Be it cleaning up local drinking water, providing education or health care.

While we see providing social and environmental benefits as a cost here in America, it will come full circle and bite us in the ass if we don't and it will be a lot costlier when we do. but for now the eye is on the financial gain, so we will continue to weave our social and environmental endeavors into this web. In some ways this is the easy way out, accounting is simple. Environmental destruction is a hard one to measure and when it comes to justice, everyone has an option on what is fair for the social good.
This is where it is going to get interesting - this is where leadership lies.