Wallet Mouth

Can sustainability be standardized?

The folks at Sustainable Business Achievement Ratings (S-BAR) think so. They’re working on a web-based tool for consumers and companies “that offers instant feedback, fast-track learning, evaluation and market-segment comparisons” regarding corporate environmental and social performance.

As S-BAR’s site points out, a wide variety of voluntary environmental and social standards exist covering various product, facilities, and company attributes, but they don’t add up to a coherent whole.

As a result, it’s difficult for consumers to know just how “good” any given company is—and for businesses to know what exactly they should do to be considered “good.”

S-BAR says it has developed a conceptual framework (using five categories—governance and management, workplace, community, marketplace, and environment) as well as software specifications for its tool. Currently it’s in research-and-analysis mode to refine those standards. And it’s looking for funding so that it can start beta-testing and preparing to roll out the system.

Sustainability standards are certainly an intriguing idea, but I have to wonder how well they will “take,” given that so many different ideas exist on what sustainability means. I immediately think of the debates surrounding the USDA organic standards. But my interest is certainly piqued.

Amuse-bouche: bottled water

PepsiCo’s Aquafina to come clean on its source. Link.

Flak jacket

Yesterday I was shopping at my local REI, and I couldn’t help but notice how many of the windbreakers I was trying on were made in China.

Since I’ve been blogging about such issues of late, I decided to ask whether REI uses an auditor to ensure that the Chinese-produced apparel it sells is made in factories that adhere to decent labor standards. The clerk I approached said she thought so but wasn’t sure, so she paged a manager. The manager said yes, there was some type of auditing, but he didn’t know any of the details, like whether REI did it itself or hired an independent certifier. He suggested that I call or email the company to get in touch with someone who worked in the area of social responsibility.

While I was glad that my inquiry didn’t meet with blank stares, it’s a shame that even a retailer that identifies so highly with green and worker-friendly principles doesn’t have structures in place to disseminate this type of information to customers on the floor.

Who’s less evil?

In my last couple of posts, I’ve pondered the relative evilness of Kraft, Kellogg, and Safeway in the context of breakfast cereal. Today I’m going to try to get some clarity on the question by looking at a few resources for data on the companies.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Responsible Shopper for a while now. A project of Co-op America, it summarizes the social and environmental responsibility (or lack thereof) of some 180 companies and brands. While the site doesn’t profile Kraft directly, it does link to a U.S. campaign that calls on consumers to boycott the company and let its executives know about their opposition to its use of GMOs.

Responsible Shopper does profile both Kellogg and Safeway. And GMOs are mentioned in both write-ups. Safeway is also criticized for “maintaining unfair terms of trade” and “its struggle to keep employee benefits at a minimum.” 

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Ethiscore, which I’ve blogged about before, actually has a Breakfast Cereal category among its reports (granted, it’s one of the subscriber-only reports, but hey—I’m a subscriber, and I have no qualms about sharing). And unlike Responsible Shopper, it provides numerical ratings.

It just so happens that among the 35 entries in the cereal report are Grape-Nuts and Kellogg’s Breakfast Cereals. Now, personally I think it’s a bit odd to compare one specific cereal with a whole family of cereals (especially since Grape-Nuts is a member of the huge Post family), but I’ll take what I can get. And here’s what I got: Grape-Nuts scores a 4, and Kellogg’s Breakfast Cereals gets a 9. This is on a scale of 1 to 20, mind you, so neither number is very good: 0 to 4 is “very poor,” and 5 to 9 is “poor.” 

Ethiscore gives Grape-Nuts the biggest black marks for environmental reporting, animal rights (“use of gelatin”), workers’ rights (“concerns over Indonesian palm oil supplier”), irresponsible marketing (“marketing unhealthy food to US children”—hmm, I get the feeling it is talking about Kraft, not just Grape Nuts), and political activities (WHO lobbying). It’s also criticized for using genetically engineered ingredients.

Kellogg’s biggest dings are for environmental reporting, irresponsible marketing, and political activities (“possible GMOs” are also mentioned, but keep in mind that Ethiscore is based in the U.K., where GMO restrictions are much stronger than in the U.S.).

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Now check out this cool resource I found last week: Covalence SA is a Geneva-based company that plots the ethical reputation of some 200 multinationals over time using inputs from companies, media outlets, and NGOs, consumer organizations, and the like (in fact, anyone can submit data). It does this via its EthicalQuote system, which lets you pick a sector and specific companies within it, and view and compare graphical representations of their reputations. The only drag is that data from the past 12 months isn’t included in the free, public version of EthicalQuote—the up-to-date version will set you back $3,800(!). Warning: I couldn’t get EthicalQuote to work in Firefox, only Internet Explorer.

To get EthicalQuote’s assistance on my cereal quest, I selected the Food & Beverage sector, highlighted Kraft and Kellogg, hit the Draw button and then the Fit button. Bingo: From mid-2002 until mid-2006, the green line representing Kellogg generally follows an upward slope—as opposed to Kraft, which dives way down until early 2005, when it starts heading upward. In the end, Kellogg has clearly beat out Kraft on reputation.

A neat feature of the tool is that if you grab and move the vertical red line over the graph, positive and negative data summaries pop up. So I got to read (among many other items) that in 2004, Ethical Corporation magazine wrote that Kellogg was named in a report by the U.K.’s Consumers’ Association complaining that manufacturers were contributing to diet-related health problems by “lacing” their products with unhealthy ingredients.  

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So, to summarize, Responsible Shopper isn’t a fan of Kraft, Kellogg, or Safeway. And since both Ethiscore and EthicalQuote (neither of which mention Safeway) give Kellogg higher ratings than Kraft, I’ll consider Kellogg the less evil company. But that doesn’t mean I think they’re grrrrrreat.
 

Wouldn’t it be COOL to know where your food comes from?

Most Americans think so. According to a study released today by Consumers Union, the nonprofit behind Consumer Reports, 92 percent of us support country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for food. Ninety-two percent!

I would be surprised at that number were it not for all the recent problems with tainted goods from China. But I was surprised to read that the federal government mandated COOL way back in 2002 for nearly all food products. However, “implementation has been delayed until October 2008, with the exception of seafood.”

What gives?

Ethiscore: Not for the poor

I recently ponied up $30 for a year’s subscription to Ethiscore.org, a British site that aims to help users “quickly and easily identify the best products to support and the worst companies to avoid.”

It’s a neat tool, but it’s far from perfect. There’s no search, for example. (Its sister site, Corporate Critic, which is aimed at institutions rather than individuals, does have search, but it costs nearly $1,800 a year to subscribe.) To access the data in Ethiscore, you scroll through nearly 150 product categories (that’s if you’re a subscriber; otherwise you can only access 15) and select one you’re interested in. That calls up a list of brands, each with a numerical rating on the somewhat nonintuitive scale of 0 to 20 (0 to 4 = very poor, 5 to 9 = poor, 10 to 14 = average, 15 to 20 = good).

The ratings are based on five categories: environment, people, animals, politics, and product sustainability. Much like Alonovo, you can customize how much weight is given to each category based on your preferences. Unlike Alonovo, Ethiscore is not integrated into the shopping experience. It does let you generate shopping lists, though. And it has a cool mail-form feature that lets you email companies and tell them that you like (or don’t like) their practices.

Overall, Ethiscore’s data offering feels a bit limited, both by its selection of product categories and by the number of entries in each category. Only 27 brands are listed under breakfast cereal, for example, many of which I don’t recognize (it doesn’t help, of course, that the site is naturally quite heavily UK-oriented).

Most important, however, is that Ethiscore’s  mission and business model are working at cross-purposes. The information the group provides has the potential to spur real change in the socioeconomic landscape—but only if it’s  easy and convenient for consumers to obtain it and factor it into their everyday buying habits. Charging even a relatively small amount for this data represents a big barrier to a world in which consumers habitually vote with their wallets. But at the same time, it obviously requires considerable time and effort (read: money) to conduct all this research and analysis.

I traded email with one of the researchers at Ethical Consumer Information Systems (the organization behind both Ethiscore and Corporate Critic), asking about this conundrum, and she replied that the organization had always grappled with the problem, and that it was considering becoming a multi-stakeholder cooperative that could bring in “some decent money,” which would enable it to give more information away. “We are also looking into more developments on the internet side of things,” she added. “Watch this space!”

Red-flag sale

On the subway in San Francisco this morning, I did a double take as we pulled into one of the downtown stations. Milling around among the other commuters were three women dressed in business casual, but something was slightly ... off. First of all, I could tell by their body language that they were promoting something. Then I saw that attached to every article of clothing they wore—even their shoes—was an oversize price tag bearing the Marshalls logo. As I watched, of of them handed a flyer to a woman who was clearly intrigued by the gimmick. The prices were pretty low: $12.99 for a blouse, if memory serves.

As the train pulled away, I started wondering what sort of person might have stitched that $12.99 blouse, and how old he or (more likely) she is. Does she earn a fair wage? Does she get to use the toilet when nature calls?

That reminded me of an article from the current issue of ReadyMade (which happens to be one of the magazines I freelance for) about a Dutch organization called Made-By that’s both an umbrella label for companies that aim to produce their garments in a socially responsible, sustainable way, and an initiative that’s working to create greater transparency in the supply chain and helping clothing companies to clean up their production process. Especially cool is the Made-By labels “Check it out” tracking feature, which lets you type in the garment’s bar code to find out where it was made.

Hooze got the answers?

Who knows, but the folks at Grass Commons, an Oregon nonprofit, are asking the right questions and framing the issues intelligently. I’m very excited about a new, community-driven project of theirs, Hooze.org—and not just because it has an owl in its logo (though as anyone who's seen my email sig knows, I have a soft spot for fat hooting raptors).

Ahem. Basically, what makes Hooze so cool is that it’s both a wiki and a database—an editable, searchable, multidimensional collection of data all focused on companies, products, and issues that responsible consumers care about. So you can, for example, add info about businesses or brands that make you happy or angry, and also search for, say, the environmental and human rights records of a company you’re curious about.

I like Hooze so much that I’ve started contributing to it myself, mostly by adding corporate parentage tidbits as I continue to research that subject. I faced a bit of a learning curve with the interface, which can probably still be made more intuitive, but the more I play with it, the more I get my head around it.

You can participate  too; just email hooze@grasscommons.org and request an invitation.

Knowing glances

Founded by a hip-hop artist and a spoken-word poet in Rhode Island, Knowmore.org is a wiki-based repository of information that rates companies (using a method it describes as “evolving” and “unscientific”) in six areas: human rights, workers’ rights, ethics, political influence and litigation, environment, and fair trade/globalization. The site radiates grassroots activism, with photos of anti-war protesters sprinkled throughout.

The organization’s interns are working to pump up the database, but as mentioned earlier, this is a wiki, and editors are sought. Knowmore aims to be a “people’s corporate and political encyclopedia,” expansive enough so that users can search it for products, services, and brands they buy and learn more about what their dollars are supporting.

Knowmore certainly has its work cut out for it: Curious how many companies it had ratings for, I counted 210, which is probably not even a drop in the bucket when you consider the gazillions that must exist in the world. Plus, how do you keep all that info current? But all power to this effort, I say. I like the fact that there’s an immediate, reachable-sounding goal to cover every Fortune 500 company by the time the site is redesigned in the fall.

Knowmore is also handing out the code for anyone who wants to put its banner and interactive search bar (for companies, brands, and products) on their site.

It’s less of a jungle out there

I’m done with Amazon. Well, sort of.

Instead of buying stuff on Amazon, I’ve started using Alonovo, an online shopping outlet that provides ratings of its merchants (some of them, anyway) in such categories as social responsibility and business ethics. Users can customize those ratings (which come from KLD Research & Analytics and the U.S. Federal Elections Commission) according to their own values—for example, assigning more importance to how well a company complies with environmental regulations and less to how generous its charitable giving program is. In addition, Alonovo donates a portion of its revenue to nearly 100 nonprofits and activist organizations (such as the ACLU, the Breast Cancer Fund, and Unicef); shoppers choose which group their purchases will benefit.

Here’s how it works: Alonovo is a member of Amazon’s Associates program, so it’s basically a portal through which Amazon’s wares are sold. Shoppers get the same selection and price as they would on the e-commerce giant—in fact, Alonovo’s site is powered by Amazon, and the checkout process takes place on Amazon—but with the added benefit of the ratings and donations.

For each purchase on Alonovo, Amazon pays Alonovo a referral fee of up to 8.5% of the revenue associated with that purchase. Alonovo donates either all or half of that commission to the beneficiary organization chosen by the shopper. The group gets 100% if it’s an “active” partner of Alonovo’s (active partners promote Alonovo in their newsletters, websites, and email campaigns); otherwise it gets 50%. There are currently 22 active partners and 73 passive ones.

Registration on Alonovo is free and not required; Alonovo adds no fees to the products purchased through its site. It also offers forum discussions and links to CSR-related news stories.

I only wish the site could provide ratings on more companies and products—as does Alonovo itself, I’m sure—but acquiring and streamlining the data required to do that is hugely complicated, to say the least, so I’m not going to blame them.