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Underwriters Lab acquires sustainable ranking site GoodGuide

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 18:18:53 +0000

A business division of Underwriters Laboratories has acquired GoodGuide, a Valley startup that has developed a ranking system for products based around environmental, humanitarian and health scores. While the companies didn’t release terms of the deal, UL is one of the oldest and most active product safety certification companies.

GoodGuide, founded in 2007 and launched in 2008 by UC Berkeley professor Dara O’Rourke, ranks products — like soap, hair care, and cleaning supplies — on more than 140 pieces of information like whether or not a product has been tested on animals, what its ingredients are and even the social conditions for how a company runs its business. The ranking system runs between 1 to 10, and GoodGuide also offers a purchase analyser and mobile app (for using the ranking while you’re shopping).

GoodGuide is different than some of the more crowd-sourced methods of determining which products are green, because it’s seeking to create an authoritative clearinghouse based on hard data. Clearly that’s why UL wanted to bring them in. GoodGuide raised $3.73 million from NEA and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

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How Green Is Your Cell Phone?

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:13:27 +0000

GoodGuide, a startup that ranks goods on how sustainable they are, has released its latest green rankings for cell phones. The company rated 576 cell phone products and says the top rated phones have energy efficient chargers and are made of more sustainable materials, and the manufacturers that are producing those green phones are doing so in a more environmentally friendly and socially-responsible way, and also have strong recycling programs.

You probably notice as you peruse the list, sustainability sometimes doesn’t have a lot to do with popularity of the devices themselves; green-marketed cell phones aren’t really making a dent in handset sales, and leading devices like the iPhone rank somewhere in the middle of the scale. However, Nokia took the entire top 26 greenest overall cell phones, starting with the Nokia C6 cell phone, and Nokia continues to be the world leader in cell phones sales, having sold 461.31 million phones in 2010.

Here’s how some of the more popular devices stack up on GoodGuide’s list:

iPhone 4: 5.6. Apple was dinged for a lower than average score in society for “ethical policies and performance.”
HTC Android Incredible: 5.3 – HTC got average scores for environment and society.
BlackBerry Torch: 3.3. BlackBerry devices rated on the bottom for environmental “use of resources,” and in society for “labor and human rights.”
BlackBerry Curve 3G: 3.3. The BlackBerry Curve 3G rated the same as its cousin, the Torch (above).
Motorola Droid X: 6.5. Motorola received high marks for making phones free of BFR and PVC, and also generated an above-average score in ethical policies and performance.
Nokia N8: 7.7. Nokia crushed it across all categories and for both high- and low-end phones.

GoodGuide, which launched in September 2008, also ranks appliances and lighting (as well as all types of consumer goods), and is backed by venture firms New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. GoodGuide’s researchers collect product data, which comes from hundreds of private and public sources, among them government, nonprofits, and private, third-party research firms.

The data collection process and the rating system are meant to create a sense of trust and authority for the site. However, getting visitors to see such ratings as trust-worthy and authoritative will be difficult. Good Guide’s success at earning consumers’ trust depends as much on marketing and outreach as on actual practices.

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Where Should the Feds Draw the Line on Green Marketing Claims?

Josie Garthwaite — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:32:17 +0000

We’re a little past the Wild West years of green marketing for sectors like carbon offsets, renewable energy, auto fuels and green building, but the sheriffs — the federal government and privately run certification programs — still have plenty of work to do. That was the gist of much of the testimony at a hearing entitled “It’s Too Easy Being Green” that was held today by the House subcommittee on commerce, trade and consumer protection. The title offers a concise summary of subcommittee leaders’ ideas about environmentally-themed marketing claims and suggests that the rules and enforcement for these claims could get significantly tougher in coming years.

Depending on how new rules are structured, the changes could also provide a boost for startups that fall on the greener end of the spectrum in these sectors, as well as those working on tools for informing consumers or monitoring and measuring the environmental impact of companies’ operations.

“In the past few years, there has been a virtual tsunami of environmental marketing,” said James Kohm, associate director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection’s enforcement division at the Federal Trade Commission, in his prepared testimony this morning. Unchecked, this marketing blurs the lines between innovations that actually do improve energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, for example, and those that don’t — preventing the real advances from taking off as much as they should. As he explained:

Competition based on green claims drives businesses to greater innovation, which ultimately benefits consumers by increasing the availability of the types of green products and services they desire. For the marketplace to thrive, however, companies must compete on the basis of legitimate advertising claims and consumers must be able to rely on those claims.

Kohm said the FTC tried to collect information from consumers about their perception and understanding of green claims during workshops held back in November 2007, but didn’t receive many comments. “Without this data,” Kohm said, “the Commission would face the difficult choice of either providing guidance that might inadvertently chill otherwise useful green claims or forgoing valuable guidance altogether.” So now, nearly a year and a half later, the agency is playing catch-up. It’s conducting its own study of consumer understanding of green marketing claims and expects to complete analysis of the data later this year.

UC Berkeley professor Dara O’Rourke, founder of the product rating web site GoodGuide, who also testified at today’s hearing, agreed with Kohm that confusion about green marketing claims “undercuts the market for truly greener products.” He thinks there’s a need for the federal government to take action beyond the FTC, and he called for Congress to “strengthen and expand disclosure rules that undergird product claims.” With today’s technology, he said, transparency should be a legal requirement:

[R]ecent advances in scientific measurement processes and information systems make it possible for firms and government agencies to monitor, measure, and communicate more precise information on the environmental, health, and social impacts of products and their supply chains. Put simply, there is no excuse now for not providing much higher-quality information to the public on the impacts and performance of products and companies.

Ultimately, O’Rourke wants to see the FTC and Congress teaming up to mandate full ingredient disclosure (either on product labels or on company web sites), country- and factory-of-origin information, a fully traceable supply chain and disclosure of a product’s total lifecycle impact (from the raw materials stage through manufacturing, use and disposal).

Like other companies working on systems for compiling and analyzing environmental data in global supply chains (including startups, such as RockBlocks and giants like SAP, IBM and Microsoft) O’Rourke’s GoodGuide has a significant stake in this debate — tougher disclosure rules could help beef up demand for this kind of service. Plus, as we noted back in September, when Good Guide first launched, and earlier this year when it raised $3.73 million to help it scale up, the site’s success at earning consumers’ trust in its product ratings will take time — and depends as much on marketing and outreach as on actual practices.

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GoodGuide Scaling Up With $3.73M

Katie Fehrenbacher — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 08:00:48 +0000

When GoodGuide — a web site that rates products based on how “good” they are, in terms of social and environmental practices — launched in September founder Dara O’Rourke told us that the company had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. On Monday, Pehub.com brought us a little more of the details on that round: according to a regulatory filing, GoodGuide raised $3.73 million in a Series A round.

The size of the round is tiny compared to many recent fundings in the large and diverse cleantech sector, from solar projects to biofuel plants to smart meter firms. Green web investments are a way that investors can fund a cleantech startup that requires a lot less capital than, say, power generation, and they can also be more familiar to investors — like DFJ and NEA — that built their business funding Internet and IT firms.

GoodGuide will likely be using the funds for its 12 full-time and 12 part-time employees, who collect the data on the products, and for also building out the web site. The data used to rate products on the site come from hundreds of private and public sources, among them government; nonprofits; and private, third-party research firms. The data collection process and the rating system are meant to create a sense of trust and authority for the site. However, getting visitors to see such ratings as trust-worthy and authoritative is difficult; Good Guide’s success at earning consumers’ trust depends as much on marketing and outreach as on actual practices.

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GoodGuide Keeps You On Track to Consumer Wellness

Omar McFarlane — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:22 +0000

GoodGuide‘s recently released application for the iPhone provides you with instant access to their 65,000+ strong database of safe, green, and healthy products.

Deemed the “world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social performance of everyday products and companies,” this is a great resource for those looking to avoid the abundance of chemicals we are constantly bombarding our bodies with, as well as be more environmentally conscious.

Their product descriptions give you an in-depth look at why the items received the scores they did, for reasons like “has no ingredients listed as skin or respiratory irritants” and “company has a low score in ethical policies and performance.” It also gives you a list of ingredients to avoid in product categories. For example, in colognes you should avoid oxybenzone and eugenol.

The app allows you to quickly check product reviews, ratings, and also find safer alternatives to what you may be buying. The ease of use is so great that you could actually use it while you’re in the store aisle, product in hand. If you have an account, you can create a personalized shopping list, making it easy to keep focused on what you need to pick up, or an “Avoid List” of items you don’t ever want to buy.

Currently, GoodGuide only covers personal care and household cleaning products, but they will eventually expand to include food, toys, and more to give you a better handle on the world of consumerism.

If you don’t have an iPhone though, you’re not left out in the smoke. GoodGuide also has an SMS service that allows you to text the type of product, product name, or UPC to get the same information the iPhone app provides, albiet not as elegantly.

GoodGuide is available for free via the iTunes store. The SMS service is also free, outside of your mobile provider’s SMS fees.

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How the Web Can Help You Fight Greenwashing

Katie Fehrenbacher — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:01:04 +0000

There’s been a wave of green goods crashing over our heads in recent months. But how confident are you really that the eco-friendly toothpaste (shampoo, notebook, chair, etc.) you bought was green enough to justify that much more of your hard-earned wages? Turns out the green marketing noise level has gotten so high, it’s ticking people off. Earlier this year, for example, the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency noted that in 2007 it received more than four times as many complaints about ads touting green claims than it did in 2006. So where can one find some green peace of mind? The web, of course. A growing number of web sites have started to emerge to help consumers sort through the (green) BS. Last week alone, both GoodGuide, an academic research-based site that rates how “good” products are based on 140 different criteria, and Green Wikia, a green section of the crowd-sourcing site Wikia, launched with the goal of shining a light on green goods.

The two sites take vastly different approaches. GoodGuide is the product of a decades’ worth of investigation by professor Dara O’Rourke, first at MIT and then at UC Berkeley, into supply chains and the building blocks of consumer goods. The site, which O’Rourke says was inspired by a desire to know what, exactly, was in the suntan lotion he had been rubbing on his daughter’s face, is meant to be an authoritative “top-down” approach to aiding in purchase decisions. It taps 200-plus private and public sources of information, among them government databases, non-profits, third-party research firms and the media. All that info culminates into one decisive rating that tells consumers where the product ranks, on a scale that ranges from bad to excellent, vs. its competitors.

Green Wikia, on the other hand, is all about letting the masses decide what the best green products and services are. Jimmy Wales, who co-founded both Wikia and Wikipedia, said he launched the green section of Wikia because he noticed a profound lack of quality information on green issues. And unlike the info on the green-focused pages of Wikipedia, Wales said he wants Green Wikia to offer more lifestyle tips, product options and how-to’s. Of course, relying on the wisdom of the crowd is nothing new, and a study in the journal Nature found that Wikipedia is about as accurate Encyclopedia Britannica.

So when it comes to rating green goods and services, is one method superior to the other? They both have their advantages. The green characteristics of products — reduced carbon footprint, long-term health benefits, lack of animal testing, etc. – do go largely unseen by the consumer. And there’s only so much that the average buyer of a green product can really add to a discussion on green goods, outside of a personal review. So GoodGuide will be able to inspire a lot more trust in the short term, especially as Green Wikia, which at this point is made up primarily of links to media reports and company web sits, gets built out.

On the other hand, over time, Green Wikia will have access to an unlimited amount of information — everything on the web, with input from anyone who cares to weigh in — which could theoretically lead to millions of contributors. GoodGuide, meanwhile, has 12 full-time and 12 part-time employees amassing information and rankings. Who would create better, more accurate or useful information, a group amassing select info from specific sources or millions with access to everything? At this point, we don’t know; the issue of how to mix user-generated content with professional content remains a central debate of Internet publishing. But we do know that with the level of green marketing growing by leaps and bounds, we’re going to need some smart green filters fast, from both the top down and the bottom up.

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com.

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GoodGuide Launches to Shine a Light on Products

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:10:08 +0000

Let’s face it, no matter how much you try to investigate where your products — be they shampoo, gadgets or processed food — come from, or what they’re made of, you never really know the whole story. While some web sites, like Jimmy Wale’s new Green Wikia, try to use crowd-sourcing to unearth the most accurate information, UC Berkeley professor Dara O’Rourke has decided to take a more academic and authoritative approach with GoodGuide, which launched today.

First at MIT and now at UC Berkeley, O’Rourke has spent the last decade developing ways to compile info on global supply chains, and investigating the building blocks of the goods that consumers purchase. GoodGuide rates products based on data that falls into three categories: social, environmental (including carbon footprint) and health. Each rating is based on more than 140 pieces of such information, such as whether or not a product has been tested on animals, what its ingredients are — even whether or not its parent company has women or minorities on its board. Hello granular information.

And those ratings are intended to influence a consumer’s perspective of the product, O’Rourke tells us. He even envisions consumers checking out the site on their mobile phones as they browse the shopping center aisles. In three weeks GoodGuide plans to launch an iPhone app, and they already have a text messaging application that will SMS you the rating. That’s a powerful goal — to be the de facto standard on how “good” a product is and whether or not someone will buy it.

It will also be a difficult to achieve. Trusted authority is something developed and earned over time, and to lay that much stake in a young startup company will take a lot of quality ratings work. O’Rourke is slowly amassing the tools needed for that task. The data itself comes from hundreds of private and public sources, among them government, non-profits and private, third-party research firms. He’s been working on the consumer-facing GoodGuide site for the past two years and tells us he has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. And he currently has 12 full-time and 12 part-time employees working on compiling data and product info.

O’Rourke has also taken the more unusual step of classifying his company as a “for-benefit” company, which means that it has a social aim, and dedicates a certain amount of profits for social benefits. To get that status GoodGuide had to incorporate in New York State (instead of the usual Delaware route) and get all of its investors to sign on.

So why not just be a nonprofit? O’Rourke tells us that when it comes to doing deals with the likes of phone companies and raise funding from investors, a nonprofit has a tough time. Besides, the company is considering making money by supplying a business-to-business solution or licensing its solution.

From a purely consumer/user perspective, the team has developed a pretty sticky site. In addition to the easy-to-read ratings, it also has the latest product news (like recalls) and a discussion forum. We can tell you that as GoodGuide adds more and more products to its rankings database, we’ll be spending more and more time using it.

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Freshbooks, Basecamp holding hands

Om Malik — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:21:38 +0000

You can now invoice your 37Signals’ Basecamp projects using FreshBooks. Especially helpful for Web Worker crowd. More details and screen casts here.

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First sea bottom resort planned

James Kendrick — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 22:48:34 +0000

Not mobile but certainly tech related- Poseidon Resorts plans to build the first ocean bottom resort in the Bahamas. The luxury hotel will be built in Florida and transported by barge to the assembly site. Suites are 550 m2 and will run a measly $1500 per night, with each offering a stunning view of the marine life around the module as rendered in the photo below. Earliest expected completion date late 2006.

(via Gear Live)

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