If the EPA could regulate the entire life cycle of a product and protect us from toxic toys, food, air, and clean up the atmosphere would you be excited? That game changer is happening, but it’s coming from a different direction that Main Street doesn’t watch – Certifications, Standards, and Benchmarks. In this game, it’s the clout that matters and two behemoths just joined hands, or databases…

This month, GoodGuide.com, the website with 5000 companies and 175,000 consumer products greenly rated, was purchased by Underwriters Laboratories Environment (ULE) who also has thousands of products under their tent. The collaboration is good for you for many reasons:

1.     The merger will give you additional teeth (besides political action) to publicly hold companies accountable and set off competition for positive self-corrections. Transparency will reign.

2.     In the sustainable product standards war there are over 400 groups vying for the top honors. Companies can’t choose between 400 groups, but they’ll rush to get on board when choosing between 10 standards. In that scenario, companies can do what they do well – compete – only now instead of playing green catch, they are playing green ball with rules.

3.     Standards are tremendously complex and confusing; Good Guide normalizes the confusion in an easy to understand system that any child can grasp.

4.     Good Guide asks many questions that a standard may not. For example, diversity issues and workers' rights are often not addressed in eco-standards, but Good Guide covers them.

5.     While laws stop at borders, standards account for the entire supply chain impact of a product, from production to purchase to final disposal.

How did Good Guide get so big?

With 400 wanna-be's, how did GoodGuide.com acquire the critical mass of 175,000 products?

First, they used investment funds instead of trying to launch a business model where either the user paid to see the rankings or the companies paid to have their product ranked. It’s hard to get traction when you are depending on buyer/user participation to build your database.

Second, GoodGuide focused on products that Wal Mart and their multi-national vendors might provide. One of GoodGuide’s drawbacks is that it doesn’t feature enough of the emerging green products being developed by small businesses. That’s a negative in my viewpoint, but if your goal is to change the big business market, then you have to capture the attention of big business. They will take suggestions for smaller product lines, but the product needs to bring its own clout in the form of multiple requests before it is added.

Last, GoodGuide uses publicly available information to flesh out its database. It’s not audited information (yet) but it provides a form to follow. A Good Guide scientist, Bill Pease, explained that they funnel 1500 datapoint sources into their system, boiling it down to 200 topics and from there take it to the 1-10 point (brown to green) system that you see online. As a concerned consumer, you can simply buy products in the green zone, or dig deeper and deeper for more information.

So why merge GoodGuide with ULE? Proof. Credibility. Ease-of-Use.

Underwriters Laboratories (the UL logo) has a long history of testing and reporting on products.  In 2009 UL Environment was formed as a business unit of UL. In 2010, UL Environment acquired TerraChoice and, by extension, the EcoLogo(R) Program--both based in Canada--because of the company's sustainability expertise and because of the EcoLogo Certification's marketplace recognition. In 2011, UL Environment acquired Air Quality Sciences, Inc. and the GREENGUARD Environmental Institute, North America's leading product emissions testing laboratory and third-party certifier of low-emitting products, respectively; this acquisition enabled UL Environment to help manufacturers reduce their products impacts on indoor air quality and mitigate the risk of exposure of Volatile Organic Chemicals (VOCs).  In 2010, UL Environment Acquired Germany-based Eco-INSTITUT, another product emissions laboratory and certifier, and in 2012 Good Guide.

ULE collaborated with GreenBiz to form UL 880, a multi-attribute, organization-wide sustainability standard for manufacturing facilities covering environment, governance, community engagement, and human rights.

You may have heard of Energy Star (energy) and FSC (forests) standards, they are considered single attribute (energy) or single industry (forests) standards. Multi-attribute standards cover many attributes that affect the water, air, earth, or atmosphere. It can get confusing.

Good Guide eliminates some of the confusion by aggregating information from published standard information, plus provides a bridge between the uncertified and certified world. It’s the entry door to corporate and product transparency. By merging with ULE, the datapoints in GoodGuide’s data become increasingly more solid as third party audits and full Life Cycle Assessments are conducted.

Together they have produced a more robust offering that has been missing in the consumer market. (The Sustainability Consortium has been working on a similar path, but it is for internal purchasing departments of big box store products and not directly for consumers.)

To create a sustainable society, we know that we need to buy less, recycle more, and cook organic food, but for those personal care items and other weekend cart habits we have an easy way to create a safer, less toxic world simply by buying a product with the research already done. To make it even easier, download GoodGuide’s app to your phone and scan your next purchases. See instantly where they fall on the brown to green scale.

Terms you should know:

Watch Story of Stuff – everything Annie Leonard mentions on that fascinating video is considered in a product’s Life Cycle Assessment across its entire supply chain around the world – for the technical explanation of an LCA, go here.

• A Life Cycle Assessment gathers the information.
• A Sustainable Product Standard ranks the information according to publicly agreed upon questions with weightings.
• A Benchmarking system such as Good Guide aggregates all the questions it can possibly answer. A Benchmarking system may address 200 issues while a Sustainable Product Standard may address only 100 agreed upon issues after the public vetting process. Think of Benchmarking systems as the farm league for Sustainable Product Standards major leagues.
• Certifications are generally more of a marketing thing. All standards have certifications, but not all certifications have a standard behind them. A logo is only as good as its proof of performance.
• Weightings pertain to scorecards. The weightings enable companies to compete on any given scorecard. The more points gathered, the greener or more sustainable the product.

Not only is this significant for your shopping cart, but your portfolio of stocks as well.  If it’s a safe bet for you to put it in your cart, it’s a safe bet for investment groups. Investors don’t like risk, and when a product can prove it is made safely under socially responsible conditions, risk is lowered.

Do you feel powerful when you shop? You should! You’re changing the planet with every purchase and with the help of standards, you’re keeping big corporations in check as well.

Contributed by Mary Clare Hunt. Write her at MaryClareHunt@gmail.com or visit http://www.Inwomenwetrust.com