Greener One

Challenges Entered:

Greener One is building a comprehensive database of consumer products and scores them from an environmental impact perspective. Each product in the database gets a simple-to-understand score, the Green Index. The Green Index is for the mainstream: It covers mostly "normal," non-green products, which is what the mainstream buys. The Green Index will be available to consumers in major offline and online retail outlets. The database is a mashup of data from the US Government, manufacturers, trade and environmental organizations and Greener One's online community of activists and conscious consumers. The database is granular, it shows all shades of green, how good or bad a product is for the environment. We take a full product lifecycle approach, using criteria to assess the impact of making, using, and disposing products. Consumers can use the Green Index in retail outlets to make the right choice. If they prefer to know more in-depth environmental infromation about the product or see how the Green Index is calculated, they can access this information right on our web site. They can also join other activists and conscious consumers and help us build and validate the database on an ongoing basis.

What else have you done in this area of work?

The Greener One team includes six high tech veterans with over 50 years collective experience in Internet, consumer, and community-driven technologies. The team is committed to using this experience to empower people with information to make positive change. This is the teamâ€™s first environmental project, however, the same team has built other large databases using the power of user communities on the Internet.

Project Details

Project url:

http://greenerone.com

Project video:

Project Assessment

Financial support:

Project has financial support

Project goals:

Greener One is empowering millions of mainstream consumers to shop responsibly.The Greener One project is based on the following premise: Human consumption is the driving factor behind environmental degradation.People want to make the right purchasing choices, but: They donâ€™t know how to determine which products are better for the environment. They donâ€™t want to sacrifice quality or convenience. Our goal is to provide a simple environmental score for most products sold in major retail outlets across the US online and offline. We are bringing this score to the point of sale when and where people make purchasing decisions. The end result is twofold: first, companies will take notice that people are buying more responsible products and change their practices accordingly, and second and more importantly, the more that consumers buy greener products, the less damage will be done to the environment. Greener One believes that the positive power of information + critical mass = real change.

Identified Obstacles:

Experts in both social networking and activist campaigns to help us implement a campaign to build a core group of activists within our community. A green certification expert. Our long term goal is to become an industry standard label for consumer goods and services. To achieve this goal, we are looking for a key team member who will assist us in refining our environmental criteria and help us identify environmental sources.Business development help: We need to build partnerships in two key areas:Non-profit and governmental organizations that help us gain credibility Retail partners to make the Green Index available to consumersEngineers. We are picky, but have two basic criteria:You need to be passionate about our product and our causeYou need to have a few high traffic web 2.0 projects under your belt