The Metrics Project
The Metrics Project is a blueprint for a set of practical measurements and indices to account for the impact of human activity on the ecosphere – and their use in driving consumer and business behavior towards sustainability.
Previous measurements have fallen short by not granting consumers and purchasers with the ability to weigh environmental effects at the point of purchase. Other existing methodologies have attempted to provide enterprises with a bottom line for accounting for the environment, or provide per capita estimates of a society's ecological footprint.
The Metrics Project's blueprint addresses thee challenges by combining four key components:
- lifecycle analysis to tally ecological effects,
- eco-accounting with conversion rates to roll up those ecological effects into a common currency (the eco),
- a consumer-oriented index (the sustainability score) to compare a product's effects against sustainability, and
- standards for ecolabeling to communicate a product's sustainability score to its buyer.
More detail is available here.