Guiding Companies -- and Consumers -- to Sustainability

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Bill Baue of Sea Change Media

Rising interest in companies’ social and environmental sustainability is fueling a renaissance in guides rating “good companies.” This hearkens back to the green wave of the late ‘80s, when John Elkington and Julia Hailes wrote The Green Consumer Guide (right about the time Elkington launched SustainAbility), and Joel Makower joined the team for a US edition in 1991. The new wave of “green guides” adds the power of web accessibility -- and the age-old challenges of crunching data accurately and defining what the heck “good” and “green” mean.

Case in point: late last month, I got tweeted that @Goodness500 was following me (@bbaue) as well as Sea Change (@cchange), so of course I checked them out to see about following them in kind. According to their website, they rank the sustainability of the “largest publicly traded companies” to “educate consumers about corporate social responsibility” with an approach that is “more MTV than WSJ.”

But the ranking categories -- charity, equality, and environment -- seem a bit thin. Only one of the first 25 companies even has an environment score. Estee Lauder ranks 21 of 500 in part because it produced 4,683 pounds of toxic waste, but released none in the air -- and it uses 36 million kilowatt-hours of “green energy” per year. The company also got a 100 percent policy score in the “equality” bucket -- but I’m scratching my head on what a “policy score” is, with no link to explain.

The methodology section mentions some sources, but leaves me guessing which source underlies which category. For example, there’s a link to a dated Human Rights Campaign page (8/25/2007) -- I had to dig to discover that HRC’s Corporate Equality Index is the source for the policy score. And the EPA Green Challenge link leads to the EPA definition of green power, but the Toxic Releases Inventory link leads not to TRI but to the Right to Know Network, leaving me in the dark on exactly where Goodness500 gets its “toxicity produced” and “toxicity released” data.

So I direct messaged (or “dm’ed” for the twitter-literate) @Goodness500 to suggest some other sources (such as the Toxic 100 for TRI info and Climate Counts), and founder Michael Mossoba responded with thanks and a request for more tips on “where to get the data.” Getting the data seems less a task than providing interpretation and contextualization to inform consumer decisions that actually lead to better social and ecological outcomes.

This week saw the launch of the Good Company Seal by Iconoclasts Inc. The project seems similarly long on aspirations to “continually improve our world,” and short on data (they have yet to name the recipients of the seal) and methodological transparency, with scant info on their website beyond vague assurances of a “strict code of ethics” and an “Integrity Committee who act as an advisory panel regarding certification standards and company applications.”

This week also saw the infusion of support for ethipedia.net, an online encyclopedia of sustainable business practice, from the Business Development Bank of Canada as official sponsor of the site’s Canadian case studies. The site seems wiki-like, with companies posting examples of their own best practices, and other stakeholders such as “researchers, students, and consultants” invited to add to the mix. “To ensure a high degree of credibility, the site Administrators monitor and vet submitted practices according to a set of concrete social and environmental criteria (which will soon be published on the site).” Assuming the criteria already exist since data is up on the site, it’s hard to understand why the info is not already posted prominently.

At a recent Harvard Business School meeting on integrated financial and sustainability reporting I attended, Steve Lydenberg of Domini Social Investments pointed to what may be the gold standard of sustainable products guides: GoodGuide. The site, which is still in beta, provides a deep history of its founders, mission, and business model, as well as comprehensive descriptions of its ratings and methodology, complete with exhaustive caveats of what it doesn’t cover.

Its Estee Lauder profile (with a company rating of 5.8 out of 10) reads like Tolstoy, with clearly identified data sources (an A-list of research providers, including Asset4, KLD, Innovest, and RiskMetrics, to name just a few) and tons of categories. For products, the site also provides comparison tools. Add to this Green America’s Responsible Shopper website, which links to campaigns and alerts of news accounts, and consumers have more than enough data to make informed buying decisions to support social and environmental sustainability.