“What’s really in this stuff?”
June 1,2009
We heard about GoodGuide.com from Daniel Goleman, the author of Ecological Intelligence, when he was a guest on Bill Moyers Journal. This consumer website rates over 70,000 “safe, healthy and green” products (food, personal care, household chemicals, and toys) on a ten-point scale. Ratings are broken down according to the social, environmental, and health impacts of the product. You can see how Beech-Nut Butternut Squash, Ecover Floor Soap and Surf's-up Beach Barbie stack up against the competition, and easily access the methodology and the sources on which the ratings are based. The site also makes it easy to compare prices and find stores by zip code, and has a “news and recalls” section.
GoodGuide originated as a UC Berkeley research project, when Dara O’Rourke was smearing sunscreen on his five-year old daughter Minju for the umpteenth time and wondered (for the first time), “What’s really in this stuff?” An Associate Professor of Environmental and Labor Policy at Berkeley, O’Rourke did his homework and was dismayed to discover that the sunscreen contained a toxic ingredient. Realizing how little consumers know about the products on their shelves, he created a team of scientists, technologists and industry professionals to remedy the information gap. This resulting web resource gives us, in Goleman’s words, “radical transparency”: the actual costs of many of the bottles and boxes we choose between every day.
