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Finding green peace of mind

September 23, 2008 | Hospitality Industry

Green marketing noise level has gotten so high, it's ticking people off, writes BusinessWeek. Earlier this year, Britain'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.

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 decade’s 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, nonprofits, 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.

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