This is a great discussion.

In the late 80's/early 90's I led the EPA's Life Cycle Assessment task force which was founded on much the same principal...."If consumers were only aware of the environmental impact of the products they bought, the free market will solve many of our environmental ills." The devil - as they say - is in the details. LCA is one of the more complex processes even for environmental professionals. And, after you have spent months on the analysis, the results are often equivocal. Ultimately, environmental impacts are difficult to quantify at an ecosystem level and nearly impossible at a product level. Assuming average consumers will understand this melange is wishful thinking and potentially dangerous to the environmental movement.

While transparency is important and has worked extremely well with laws like the toxics release inventory, it has its limits and in some cases, can be self defeating. Witness the "cry wolf" effect that Proposition 65 has had in California. With nearly every product and service labeled as hazardous to our health, the public has essentially tuned out these messages. The ultimate effect being a loss of credibility and - worse yet - a loss of sensitivity to warnings of actual hazard.

So, in the end, transparency is a terrific and powerful tool. But like any power tool, it must be handled with care!

Tim Mohin

Hummm, point of view makes all the difference. I'm of an age when I remember the purchasing boycotts of tuna and Nestle products. They had an impact, so I do believe that the more we know the easier and quicker we will change our buying habits. I also agree that many, many people are very circumscribed in their buying decisions and personal ease and finances make a huge impact on buying decisions. That said, Dan's look into the not too distant future seems to begin to provide the mechanisms for making such decisions both easy and clearly of financial benefit to the purchaser.

As a firm believer in open and easily accessible information as a keys to this shift, I'm heartened the the possibilities look better than ever before. The 'advertisement' and education around these possibilities needs to be accelerated and both of you are doing this - BRAVO!

This is not a matter of ''whose right' but one of yes and... we are all on the same team and both of you offer points that need to be addressed and built upon to take us forward. You both give me hope!

Kathryn Alexander
Ethical Impact, LLC
http://www.ethicalimpact.com

The idea that the consumer could drive the market to support responsible product development is so strong that I cannot understand any lack of support. Evaluating products to understand their impact on the enviroment is a very difficult and expensive process. But do not be mistaken, it can and is being done. There are products meeting Cradel to Cradel certification that are evaluated down to the parts per million. A new e3 sustainability standard developed by BIFMA has established a new standard in the commercial furnishing industry. Initially, the consumer will bear some of that cost but in the long run, it is expected that enviromentally friedly products will be of equal or less cost to the consumer. I believe enviromental standards need to be clearly defined and they need to meet or exceed the highest standards in the world. As we look at the future, we have to demand responsible products made from responsible companies. It is good for our personal well being and for every company can only improve the bottom line.

Hunter

I've been an evangelist for this for years as well. There's no doubt in my mind at all that:

1) Informed consumers need to be informed extremely conveniently....which will happen with GoodGuide & other, even better systems & partners.

2) When consumers pick products with these factors in mind, it will affect profits, and then the real issues will enter the decision meetings.

The ONLY way to really affect change in the world, is to affect profits. We already have tons of mechanisms that are tuned to be ultra-responsive to any change to profit. So, we need to go there!

-John Schmitt

I can’t resist entering this happy fray, since I spend much of my day dealing with these issues. A couple of points:

If our ultimate goal is to transform production into cleaner, less wasteful, more sustainable, practices, I think we can all agree that full ingredient disclosure/"radical transparency" is necessary but not sufficient. We need to institutionalize precaution within our chemicals regulatory system, so that we will not face the situation we faced 10 years ago, when there was NO toxicity data available on 43% of all high-production volume chemicals, and only 7% of these chemicals had complete toxicity datasets (under OECD definitions). Precaution requires full transparency, and ultimately we must re-invent our national chemicals policies, which is a much bigger discussion (check out California’s new Green Chemistry Initiative or the European Union’s REACH legislation for the shape of things to come).

In the meantime, what can we do? My answer is: Everything we can! We need legislation to jump-start new recycling markets, promote extended producer responsibilty, and ban known hazardous ingredients from certain uses. We need harmonization of the 250+ ecolabels currently available in the US under one, easily recognizeable national label....or, alternately, incorporating them under some other umbrella, such as GoodGuide. We need wide-ranging, standardized LCAs to shape policies, guide ecolabel development, and (for some products) guide purchases. We need to harness new networking tools that were never dreamed of even 10 years ago (GoodGuide, again...) And we need effective social marketing to educate the public on their (now much simpler) purchasing options.

There is simply no doubt that green purchasing legislation and programs have already transformed markets. Look at the proliferation of recycled content papers, Energy Star appliances, Green Seal cleaning products, and EPEAT registered computers, for example. It's important to note that these gains have come most easily in institutional purchasing, where centralized purchasing authorities and (often) internal green purchasing policies have driven very large contracts. For the average consumer, choices are more difficult - we probably won't find Green Seal or Ecologo seals on our cleaning products or personal care products. I am especially excited about the potential for GoodGuide to provide the simplifying tool that consumers need, and give us a big evolutionary nudge toward being a sustainable civilization.

Chris Geiger - San Francisco Green Purchasing Program Manager

John, I agree with you 100 percent. The big shift in companies merging sustainability with business strategy will come when ecological upgrades mean more sales. The current sustainability focus on finding money-saving efficiencies is good so far as it goes. But only when the full ecological footprint of products matter for sales -- because radical transparency gives shoppers the right information -- will companies energetically protect their brands by upgrading the full range of impacts as assessed by GoodGuide-type ratings.
Then there are the huge institutional purchasers --Chris is right. Some already require suppliers to make yearly upgrades to keep contracts. The more that spreads among big buyers, the quicker ecological improvements will pervade the supply chain. Chris,have you thought of using Goodguide as a lens for your purchasing decisions? Might other governments -- municipal, state, Fed -- be persuaded to do likewise? That, too, could kickstart the true ecological upgrades we need.
If your want to explore these issues more, check out thoughtful insights on the power of buyers from Dara O'Rourke [LINK:http://www.morethansound.net/ecological-awareness.php], developer of GoodGuide, as well as industrial ecologist Gregory Norris, who is piloting the LCA-based supply chain management tool Earthster.

Dan Goleman

I am almost finished reading Ecological Intelligence and I too believe in the power of radical transparency. It is hard for us who are entrenched in the green industry to imagine that many consumers don't even give a thought to what they are buying most of the time. However, it has been my experience that the majority of people have no idea about the impact of what they are buying. I know this because I started Zolagoods which uses the home party model (think green Tupperware parties) to educate and empower people to find the small changes they can make to help the environment. People are genuinely shocked when they hear how many water bottles we throw away every hour or how much oil is used to make disposable bags. When people realize that their choices add up and make a difference, they always want to make a change. So it is our job - whether it is through better labels, on-line databases, or informational gatherings (e.g. Zola parties) to be the bridge between the green movement and the average consumer. We need to help make the transition to more sustainable products easy and affordable for everyone.