Fortune magazine published an intriguing article on the trouble with green ratings for products.  You know – those things that indicate a product is “ecofriendly”, “sustainably harvested”, “free range”, “cage free”, or any number of labels you see on products these days.  The holy grail of labels would be an overall picture of a product’s sustainability – something Walmart set out to create in 2009.  Other efforts by Patagonia and apparel manufacturers are also well underway.  So what’s the problem?

Creating a green rating requires extensive knowledge of a product’s inputs, sources, manufacturing processes, and end of life disposal.  That’s information many manufacturers may not know or won’t share.  Thus – many ratings exclude important factors in a product’s footprint in favor of rating what they do know.  Others try to compile all the information companies and other entities release into a single rating.  While that solves the problem of making data easily understandable, it relies on manufacturer released data that can’t easily be verified or company level data that is difficult to apply at the individual product level.

Savenia Labs’ approach is different.  We only use primary data from our world class independent testing labs and then report out exactly what we found.  And we’ve found some amazing things…to be released this fall.  By providing data ‘straight from the lab’, we can help individuals and businesses make more informed decisions  about the products they buy.