The Google of Green Shopping?

Here's why consumers can't buy green, even though survey after survey says that a majority of them want to:

Product labels don't include the results of a complete life-cycle assessment of a product (that is, the environmental and social impacts of all the manufacturing and all the extraction of materials required to make a product). Some tentative steps have been made in this direction—Ecolabelling.org lists almost 500 different eco-labels used world-wide, and some are even based on life-cycle assessments – but none captures the hundreds of impacts that a single life-cycle assessment can reveal.  If only we had access to information about the total impact of everything that went into the products we buy, we would be able to be truly green consumers.

Without that information, we're at the whim of our own (justifiable) skepticism about the potentially greenwashed claims of makers of consumer products.  Or so says Daniel Goleman, author of the new book Ecological Intelligence. Goleman is also the progenitor of the term "emotional intelligence," and, over the course of dozens of books and hundreds of lectures, has made a career out of helping people think about everything from mediation and leadership to the political consequences of insufficient empathy. In Ecological Intelligence, he argues that a disempowering lack of data, known as information asymmetry, is what robs consumers of the ability to vote with their dollars. His solution is simple: He argues that the web and other information technologies are on the cusp of putting all this information at our fingertips.

Ecological Intelligence is a thoughtful book, but it is also, primarily, a practical guide to how to buy green.  Specifically, Goleman cites the recently launched GoodGuide.com as proof of concept. The website aims to evaluate every product on its environmental and social impacts by summing up 200 independent databases that contain that kind of information.  "[With GoodGuide,] all of a sudden you have radical transparency, from when a product is first made to disposal," says Goleman. "This is really, I think, a revolutionary change."  GoodGuide was launched by Dara O’Rourke, the same industrial ecologist and environmental consultant from the University of California, Berkeley who blew the whistle on Nike's use of sweatshop labour. 

Beyond comparing a product to all its competitors on a scale of 1 to 10, GoodGuide has another clever feature—with a single click, it allows consumers to tell companies why they made their purchasing decision. The idea is that a customer could tell a company that they had gone with a competitor's product because of information they'd learned on GoodGuide or elsewhere—for instance, because their brand of canned tomatoes was lined with BPA-containing plastic and competitor's wasn't. Goleman notes that "consumer feedback is very powerful.... If what we're doing is shopping for a better world, that ripples through the company."  While GoodGuide is unusual in its comprehensiveness and emphasis on both environmental and social impacts, it is only one of the sites that strives to make the impacts of our consumption transparent. Another is Consumer Reports' Greener Choices, which includes a database of eco-labels and an assessment of green product claims. Skin Deep, a project of the Environmental Working Group, tackles the personal consequences of the hundreds of thousands of untested industrial chemicals humans expose themselves to every day. It lists all the chemicals in personal care products, as well as the results of any animal or human studies conducted on those chemicals.

All the efforts to address the impacts of our consumption are connected to the same core issues, says Goleman. "Our dilemma is this: Our whole palette of industrial chemicals was developed in a day when we were innocent. Now that we know, it's like Eden after the apple. It means that we have to rethink everything."  Rethinking everything we buy isn't going to be easy: Lifecycle analyses of even the most basic materials can be daunting in their complexity, and much of what we take for granted in modern society is produced in a less than savory manner, from an environmental perspective. Goleman says that the manufacture of glass, for instance, requires 1,959 discrete steps. "The technology to make glass was developed in 1850," he says. "And we still make concrete by burning lime for 48 hours—that process has been unchanged since 1820."  Goleman is an optimist with a pragmatic bent—why else would he write a guide to 'ecological intelligence' that is basically about smart shopping?—but he has no illusions about what's at stake.  "Our entire industrial base is destroying the planet," says Goleman. "And the worse news is that our brain is attuned to perceive dangers we no longer face. All that we do face is too vast or distant to be perceived."  With a little luck, an iPhone connected to GoodGuide.com will prove Goleman wrong.