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Startup Fights Greenwashing With Data Sent to Your Phone

By Alexis Madrigal from wired.com

Ever since companies across America, from Exxon to Wal-Mart, started “going green,” scientists, environmentalists and skeptics have all been wondering: What the does green mean, anyway?

Today, a startup came out of stealth mode claiming that they’ll put hard numbers to companies’ health and environmental claims about their wares.

Spun out of Berkeley’s Sustainability Information Lab and funded by prominent venture capital firms,GoodGuide plans to provide free, scientist-vetted data about the things you buy.

“I think there’s a burgeoning awareness that there is a global supply chain behind a product,” Dara O’Rourke, GoodGuide’s founder and a Berkeley professor, told Wired.com. “People are seeing that there are real costs to these everyday low prices. The question is, can we deliver this information in a way that is simple and easy and helps people make decisions?”

GoodGuide wants to step into the information vacuum that has developed along with the green movement. Many consumers want to purchase products in line with their values — whatever they are — but find it difficult to know if one soap or shampoo is actually better than another for their health or the planet’s. The situation has been complicated by marketers who’ve seized on the slogan “going green” to promote products with questionable or unknown impacts.

O’Rourke’s company isn’t the only one working on the lack of information in the green space. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launched a new green-focused site called Wikia Green earlier this week that aims to use the community-driven approach to vetting green info. Wales said that even if you had the money to pay ethical premiums for products, it was hard to know where to put it to do the most good.

“Suppose you’ve decided you’ll spend an extra $500 uneconomically, but you still want to optimize,” Wales said. “What are the basic impacts of various things that I can do?”

That turns out to be a harder question to answer than you might think. Wales is hoping that a fervent community develops around Wikia Green to come to reasonable conclusions about what products are “green” but lack of good data could slow the growth of the site.

GoodGuide’s database, the product of a decade of supply chain research, draws on more than 650 data sources, some public and some private, to create basic metrics for what’s safe to use and “green.” It turns out that for many products, there aren’t huge benefits of one product over another, but it takes getting the nitty-gritty details to figure that out. 

“Most shampoos are pretty similar, so there isn’t a lot of difference for most products, but there are some where your purchase can make a huge difference,” O’Rourke said. “There’s no question that there’s still huge gaps in the data, but we’re taking a big step forward on what is the most comprehensive and reliable set of data ever made available to the public for free.”

Many consumer decisions are still made at retail, so O’Rourke wants to provide multiple mobile ways to access the company’s data. Beginning tomorrow, you’ll be able to receive text messages about products based on their UPC code and an iPhone app will follow within weeks. And that’s not counting the applications that outside users could come up with: GoodGuide will have an open API that exposes the site’s data for other applications. That could help provide firm grounding for sites like Wales’ Wikia Green.