Good on You is a startup that rates almost 2,000 fashion brands based on ethical, environmental, and animal testing standards. Brands rated have certifications such as "Fair Trade," for respecting labor rights in the supply chain, or "Cradle to Cradle," for minimal waste caused by product design; Good on You factors databases of over 50 of these certifications into a custom rating system and also supplements this analysis with multiple layers of "human review".
Greenpeace, one of the most well‐known environmentally advocacy non profits in the world, has released a report on the impact of 17 large consumer electronics brands. Greenpeace bases the grades on each brands' electronics emissions and energy footprint, ecological and resource footprint, and concentration of chemicals with hazards. Given the source ande details available behind these grades, they are likely reliable. Additionally, plenty evidence shows that electronics creates an e-waste and toxification problem, additionally concentrated in less affluent areas of the world.
EWG rates cosmetics products on a scale of 1 (low hazard) to 10 (high hazard), and also certifies some products as "extremely safe and healthy" with an "EWG Verified" label. And EWG rates food products on the same 1 to 10 scale. Clearing the ambiguity of the 1 to 10 scale requires a deeper dive into how the rating is determined. EWG rates cosmetics products on scores for 17 health hazard categories, such as "cancer," "ecotoxicity," and "immunotoxicity," calculated by looking at the ingredients listed and health risk claims made from 55 academic, government, and EWG organized databases. Afterwards, the individual scores for these categories are weighted into a final score from 1‐10 [33]. EWG rates food products based on scores for nutritional value, ingredient concerns, and processing. The scores for each of these categories are calculated from ingredients listed by the manufacturer on the product label. Thus, it seems like the EWG staff puts a significant amount of effort into the research behind these databases. But while they may do so, the data source is still sometimes unreliable. EWG sometimes errs too far on the side of caution, lowering ratings based on slight traces of chemicals harmful in large quantities but not so in the concentration found in the products they rate. Additionally, EWG does not test products but rather uses a list of ingredients provided by other sources, which do not provide information on exact concentration of a chemical in a product. For this reason, while we do find them valuable as a starting data source, we also rate them as "MIXED" in credibility.
National Library of Medicine (NLM) rates over 20,000 common household products. The database only offers information only on health effects; thus, this source is only used in 3 Elephants to identify health risks. NLM is a government source, and they hold reporting to validated standards and use primary source data. Yet NLM's database sometimes does not have the most current information about a product.
We aggregate information from 3rd party data sources. We first refine our search of these sources using the product name, ASIN, brand, and category. We do additional work to filter out irrelevant results. Then, we combine the remaining results together in a weighted average, giving higher importance to more relevant information.
We are group of college students from the University of Sourthern California and UC Santa Cruz - with the goal of encouraging you to integrate environmental considerations more into your life.