Seeking a Guide in the Green Wilderness
There’s been talk in Washington lately about creating a single government certifying agency that would put its stamp of approval on products that help the environment. Such a program would work to steer all of us toward legitimate “green” solutions and prevent products that really aren’t eco-friendly from saying that they are.
As someone who’s spent the last 20 years countering the damage that fake green products inflict on the reputation of those with a legitimate benefit, you’d think I would endorse the idea of a standard regulatory seal. And I do, but with caveats.
The idea of a single green standard certainly sounds good. Right now there are no standards. Virtually anyone can market their product as good for the environment regardless of whether that’s true. In the vacuum that has been created by the lack of governmental standards, and the lack of enforcement of the few rules that do exist, dozens of organizations have raised their hands to compete for supremacy. By some counts there are more than 200 different green product certifying programs in the U.S. Add to that an increasingly crowded green product marketplace, and it’s no wonder consumers are confused and distrustful.
A single certifying seal that we could trust would go a long way toward clearing up the confusion. I’m just not sure the government is up to the task. I worry that a federal process would put too many cooks in the kitchen, involve too many lobbyists trying to put a green face on business as usual, and result in a lowest common denominator standard that would simply make it official that “green” means nothing much at all.
There’s also the issue of what specific product features a green standard would be based on. Will it use a narrow set of environmental safety or resource conservation measurements? Or will it also consider things like climate change, biodiversity, and air and water pollution? And what of social concerns like human rights and labor practices? Will those count as they should?
The answers to these questions are murky at best when considering a federal solution. I think a better bet would be for the legitimate green business community to coalesce around an existing independent rating program and help everyone adopt and use it.
The GoodGuide is one example of a system that works. It assesses products for their impacts on more than 600 separate environmental, social, and human health issues and rates them on a color-coded 1-10 scale that lets us instantly gauge each product’s relative value and make comparisons between competing solutions. Placing this score on the product packaging would put this information right in our hands as we make our purchasing decisions.
Better still, the GoodGuide is much more than a rudimentary thumbs-up standard that simply votes products in or out depending on whether they meet a minimum threshold. It’s a complete, in-depth screening system with web-based tools that provide us with the deeper levels of information we need to become truly conscious shoppers. (Think Consumer Reports instead of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.) In effect, the GoodGuide’s ratings and the data behind them let us issue our own certifications for products based on our own priorities. Rather than default to someone else’s judgment, the GoodGuide makes us judge and jury where a product’s green credentials are concerned.
In doing this, the GoodGuide offers the best of all worlds. It makes each consumer’s opinion the most important one, and it’s a system with high standards, based on a properly broad set of measurements that avoid the narrow perspective that usually waters down these kinds of efforts. At the same time, it’s free of the political manipulation that inevitably arises whenever governments decide to define terms. It’s fairer, more honest, more versatile, and more useful than I suspect any government program would be.
That said, we’ve been down this road before and without much to show for it. Millions of dollars, for example, were spent to establish GreenSeal as America’s green product standard, but the program never took off despite its obvious worth. Right now, the best place to start is with something that’s already been started. That makes the GoodGuide an excellent option. We just have to put it to work before Washington gets to work on something less effective.
By Jeffrey Hollender
Chief Inspired Protagonist
Seventh Generation, Inc.
www.seventhgeneration.com
