Use the Web to Help Fight Greenwashing!

Companies have definitely noticed a growing public interest in green products, and they’re taking advantage accordingly – some of them, marketing products as ‘green’ without any factual basis for doing so.  That, my friends, is called ‘greenwashing’, and it’s something we’re always on the lookout for here at EarthFirst.com.  Why should we spend more of our hard-earned money on stuff that isn’t really good for the earth, just because some greedy company wants to make an extra buck?

Luckily, we’ve all got an easily accessible ally in our fight against greenwashing: the world wide web.  Last week, two new sites launched that can help us separate the good from the bad.

From Gigaom:

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.

Between the two of these sites – with the GoodGuide rating the ‘greenness’ of products based on 140 criteria and Green Wikia highlighting the green qualities of all different kinds of goods – we should have a pretty good starting point as we try to navigate the maze of green product claims.  It puts more power on the consumer’s side, making sure that companies are forced to back up the supposed earth-friendly features of their products.  So, use the web and be a kickass greenwash fighter!

Link [Gigaom] + [GoodGuide] + [Green Wikia]

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