GoodGuide For Safe, Healthy and Green Products

GoodGuide, Inc. is an American "for-benefit" corporation whose mission is to build tools that "transform how people see and interact with products and companies by delivering comprehensive and rigorous information at the point of purchase", as its official mission statement puts it. To the most extent we, buyers, are still in the Dark Ages and when we know the brand and the price we naively believe that we know quality. In reality however our knowledge is extremely limited in terms of the product's impact on us and the planet. GoodGuide, represented by a strong team of ecologists, chemists and engineers, surfaces a product's backstory -  summarizes all the possible information about the components of the product, the production processes and the social conditions at the producer's plant, and presents it in the easiest and most convenient way to the consumer. GoodGuide integrates hundreds of complex databases that evaluate everything from the company's policy on animal testing (if there is any) to the carbon emissions in its supply chain to the chemicals of concern in its products. GoodGuide can evaluate a company's policies, disclosure of a company's impacts on consumers, workers, communities, and the environment. GoodGuide does not tell us what to buy but instead helps us focus on what matters most in a product.

In the US the GoodGuide application for mobile phones allows shoppers to point their cell phones at the bar code of a  product and click its image to the GoodGuide server. Within seconds you will get a three-bar rating of that item, revealing in red, yellow, or green the relative level of virtue generated by that product's life cycle impact in three dimensions: environmental, health and social.

There is a long way when ordinary buyers in US will see GoodGuide's ratings next to the products' prices on the store shelves. Here in Russia we can only dream of any analogical program as GoodGuide which allows assessment of products' hidden environmental impacts at the point of sale. Movement towards ecological transparency is just gathering pace and we need a lot of time and efforts to turn the marketing balance.  However, we can easily use the GoodGuide page and check the products that are on the Russian market at the moment. There are a lot of them, believe me. This program can help us to make that consultaion a habit, and eventually we will be more conscios in our routine shopping. We will be mindful in our choice. As a result, changes in our choice will make the companies respond respectevely and modify their businesses in our country as well. 

GoodGuide