海角大神

GoodGuide and others use technology to help turn consumers green

A host of companies and nonprofits are using technology 鈥 from smartphones to social networking 鈥 to make it easier for consumers to choose environmentally friendly products.

Environmental activists dressed as what they called 'toxic beauties' protest against unsafe cosmetics during a demonstration in Manila, The Philippines, last year. The activists donned umbrella hats with boxes of recalled skin bleaching products to dramatize the health effects caused by the use of hazardous cosmetics such as mercury-laced skin whitening creams, according to the organizers.

Romeo Ranoco/Reuters/File

April 10, 2012

The way Dara O鈥橰ourke tells the story, the idea for came to him when he was slathering some suntan lotion onto his three-year-old daughter鈥檚 face.

O鈥橰ourke, an associate professor of environmental and labor policy at University of California, Berkeley, wondered about the ingredients in Coppertone Water Babies; he did some research and learned it contained oxybenzone, a potential skin irritant. Later, O鈥橰ourke found out that Johnson鈥檚 Baby Shampoo contained trace amounts of 1,4-dioxane, .

鈥淚t shocked me,鈥 he says, 鈥渢hat I basically knew nothing about the products I was bringing into my own house.鈥

Lesotho makes Trump鈥檚 polo shirts. He could destroy their garment industry.

O鈥橰ourke started GoodGuide to plug that information gap. A five-year-old company backed by $10 million in venture capital, GoodGuide employs about 20 people, including environmental scientists, chemists, toxicologists, and nutritionists, who rate more than 165,000 products, including personal care items, household cleaners, food, toys, appliances, and electronics. Each product gets a numerical rating from 1 to 10 in three categories 鈥 health, environment, and society; the ratings are then made available on GoodGuide鈥檚 website, on Facebook, and on smartphones.

O鈥橰ourke describes GoodGuide as a social enterprise, meaning the firm has a purpose that goes beyond making money: It aims to persuade consumers to vote with their wallets for environmentally friendly products and companies, and thereby help tackle big problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and industrial pollution.

鈥淭here definitely is a growing percentage of consumers who are aware and who care and who are seeking out products that have better environmental, social, and health attributes,鈥 O鈥橰ourke says. 鈥淲e view those consumers who care as point of leverage over these big, big systems.鈥 These 鈥渃onscious consumers,鈥 as they鈥檙e sometimes called, are important to the work of activist groups who bring pressure on corporations to reform their environmental or social practices; companies feel compelled to respond because they don鈥檛 want to alienate even a small share of their customers or potential customers.

It鈥檚 a reasonable theory of change. But does it work? Are there enough conscious consumers to make an impact? Shoppers may tell market researchers that they want to buy 鈥済reener鈥 products 鈥 but can they be motivated to act?

Questions like those face not just O鈥橰ourke and GoodGuide, but many companies and nonprofits that are betting on the power of green consumers. Greenpeace, for example, with the hope that consumers will reward leaders and punish laggards. (This tactic is known in the NGO world as 鈥渞ank 鈥榚m and spank 鈥榚m.鈥) Similarly, nonprofit scores big corporations on their efforts to mitigate climate change and urges consumers 鈥渢o use their choices and voices鈥 to pressure more companies to act. Taking a slightly different approach, is a shopping website that positions itself a 鈥渢rusted source for green products.鈥

Other nations had a pandemic reckoning. Why hasn鈥檛 the US?

The most ambitious effort of all, a global initiative known as 鈥 which received startup money from Walmart and now includes retailers, consumer products companies, and universities 鈥 is building scientific tools to measure and report on the lifecycle impact of thousands of products; but its progress has been painfully slow.

No one doubts that green consumers can make difference. They can be credited for the success of a slew of small and mid-sized U. companies like Annie鈥檚 Homegrown, Seventh Generation, and Stonyfield Farm that have built brands imbued with environmental goodness. (Annie鈥檚, best known for its organic mac and cheese, had sales of nearly $120 million in 2011 and had a successful IPO last month.)

Jeffrey Hollender, the former CEO of green-cleaning company Seventh Generation, says the success of these socially responsible insurgents has changed the practices of big companies. SC Johnson, for instance, listed all of the ingredients in its products only after Seventh Generation had done so. 鈥淪uccessful companies have learned to be incredibly sensitive to consumers,鈥 Hollender says.

Since the launch of GoodGuide in 2007, O鈥橰ourke says, more than 12 million people have visited the company鈥檚 website and used its mobile applications. Companies are paying attention, too, and taking steps to improve their product scores. 鈥淏asically, all of the consumer products companies are calling us up and want to interact,鈥 O鈥橰ourke says. While it鈥檚 difficult to trace any specific change to GoodGuide, Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble have reformulated their shampoos to reduce toxins, including 1,4-dioxane. And Clorox created Green Works, a line of cleaning products on which it has partnered with the Sierra Club.

In opinion surveys, large majorities of consumers consistently tell researchers that they care about environmental and social issues. But the numbers that really count 鈥 those at the cash register 鈥 tell a different tale. While hybrid cars are trendy, , at less than 3 percent of all new vehicles sold. Green laundry detergents and household cleaners make up less than 5 percent of sales in their categories, industry insiders say. Organic foods provide an impressive growth story 鈥 their sales have ramped up from $1 billion in 1990 to $26.7 billion in 2010, ; but their popularity is driven more by health concerns than by environmental awareness.

This debate isn鈥檛 new. Joel Makower, the founder of media company , is skeptical about the power of green consumers 鈥 to whom he has been paying close attention since 1991 when he was co-author of a book, . 鈥淎 small percentage of consumers, by changing their habits, can move markets,鈥 Makower says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 an incredibly compelling notion. I just haven鈥檛 seen it in the market.鈥

The idea of buying green simply doesn鈥檛 seem to drive consumer behavior, Makower notes. 鈥淲hy we can鈥檛 move people to a greener household cleaner or a recycled bathroom tissue or an energy efficient light bulb in greater numbers than we鈥檝e seen so far is one of those enduring mysteries,鈥 he says.

In an interview at GoodGuide鈥檚 offices in San Francisco, O鈥橰ourke admits that the company still has a lot to prove. (The 44-year-old academic is now chief sustainability officer at GoodGuide; the board hired George Consagra, a longtime technology executive, as CEO last year.) 鈥淚 want to be honest about hard this is,鈥 O鈥橰ourke tells me. 鈥淥riginally we thought that information will set you free. But we鈥檙e going up against millions of dollars of marketing.鈥

And yet marketing isn鈥檛 what it used to be, he notes. No longer can companies control their message. More than a decade ago, O鈥橰ourke learned firsthand how putting a spotlight on corporate malfeasance can drive change. As a graduate student at Berkeley in 1997, he was researching pollution from factories in Vietnam when he came across a leaked internal document about a Nike shoe supplier. It showed that workers were exposed to carcinogens that exceeded legal standards, suffered from respiratory problems, and were forced to work 65 hours for just $10 a week. He and posted a report on the Internet, setting off a controversy that led to a turnaround at Nike, which is now seen as a corporate leader on environmental and social issues.

His experience with Nike 鈥渟howed both the potential of a new way to distribute information, and, for me, how important it is to get my research out to the public,鈥 O鈥橰ourke says. 鈥淕oodGuide is basically an extension of that.鈥

GoodGuide began with a mobile phone app that required consumers to photograph bar codes to get data on individual products. It then posted reams of information on its website. Now it offers a popular iPhone app, as well as software called a that attaches to a Web browser. When shopping online at Amazon, Walmart, Target, and other sites, shoppers can see how products perform, according to GoodGuide, on issues they care about. A GoodGuide app can also ride atop Facebook, rating the products and companies in any ads that appear. GoodGuide intends to make money by providing specialized data to retailers or institutional buyers, such as hospitals; it currently generates revenues when consumers go through GoodGuide鈥檚 website or toolbar to make purchases on Amazon.

The company鈥檚 goal is to 鈥済et into the flow of the shopping experience and try to provide the right information at the right moment,鈥 O鈥橰ourke says. GoodGuide has offered to make its data available for display on supermarket and drugstore shelves, but so far it has found no takers. Some retailers may worry about how their store brands would perform; others make money by selling prime shelf space to specific brands, so negative ratings could get in the way of that business.

Still, it鈥檚 only going to get harder to keep consumers in the dark. Environmental groups and consumers are pressing to learn more about how and where things are made. Campaigns around palm oil in Kit-Kat bars, BPA in baby bottles, and, most recently, the ammonia-treated ground beef extender known as 鈥減ink slime鈥 have all triggered rapid reactions from business.

鈥淪pikes of information, or misinformation, in social media can pressure business practices in a big way,鈥 says Jonathan Yohannan, an executive vice president at Cone Communications.
听In such instances, the consumer doesn鈥檛 need to act. Merely the fear of exposure and a backlash can spur change. Says O鈥橰ourke: 鈥淭ransparency is moving forward. That鈥檚 unstoppable. Our big bet is that transparency is going to motivate change.鈥 It鈥檚 too soon to say whether that bet will pay off.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
is a contributing editor at Fortune, a senior writer at and a blogger at . His book, "Suck It Up: How Capturing Carbon From the Air Can Help Solve the Climate Crisis," .

鈥 at the blog .