Vision

Imagine spending an entire year without ever checking your account balance. You were born into some money, but you have no idea how much. You have no idea much you spend in a given month, or if you’ll ever see your money run out. Chances are, you’d continue spending away – until the day your credit cards are suddenly declined.

Without any practical way to account for our impact on the environment, we’re no different from this example. The debate around sustainability hasn’t quite provided us with a break-even point that anyone can agree on. Nor is it feasible to determine when exactly these resources would run out.

The Metrics Project is devoted to setting standards for eco-accounting, a set of methods for tallying up the various environmental effects that products have before, during and after consumption. Eco-accounting can also be applied to services and any other activity that could impact the environment. Like traditional accounting, eco-accounting works by keeping a register of all individual ecological effects as either credits or debits, providing you with an end balance.

A single product or service could have dozens of environmental effects in its production, its use, and its disposal. For that gallon of milk at the grocery store, eco-accounting can look at the entire supply and disposal chain, from the topsoil at the dairy farm, to the power used by the refrigerator trucks and your fridge, to the landfill space taken up by a discarded milk jug. By totaling these effects into a single eco-account, and prorating the end balance to a single unit, a very powerful metric emerges: the Sustainability Score.

The Sustainability Score is a two- or three-digit rating that’s known to a buyer or consumer at the time of purchase. By using ecolabelling– that is, placing the Sustainability Score clearly on the package – producers and distributors can communicate all of a product’s environmental effects easily and effectively to the buyer. A comparison shopper gains easy insight into the product’s lifetime effect on the world ecology – with minimal effort. There’s no research into which brands use pesticides or hormones, which containers give off dioxins, or which distributors have the cleanest fleets. In fact, your comparison wouldn’t even need to remember to buy local.

The Sustainability Score allows buyers and consumers to improve their own ecological impact without having to make a wholesale lifestyle change, or having to commit in any way. Its goal is to bring about environment change by improving purchase decisions at the micro level, thus sidestepping the problem of gaining consensus at the macro level through regulation and public policy.

Voluntary ecolabelling provides a competitive advantage for genuinely eco-friendly companies. A good Sustainability Score that follow genuinely eco-friendly production practices. By creating competition, ecolabelling also creates a strong incentive for other, less eco-friendly companies to clean up their practices.