To be sure, these cereals have fiber and vitamins — but, as the Times reported, about 40% of Froot Loops’ weight comes from the 12 grams of sugar per serving. The Times quoted the chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, who derided the ratings as “horrible choices.”

The attorney general of Connecticut announced he was investigating Smart Choice as consumer deception. The FDA began a sweeping investigation of such product claims, seeking clear standards for health claims. Two days after the FDA announcement, the Smart Choices program said they would suspend their operations.

As one FDA adviser put it, “We don’t want front-of-package information in any way based on cherry-picking the good and not disclosing adequately the components of a product that may be less good.” Past practices, such as when industries set standards too low for one or another “healthy” or “green” certification, cannot survive in the new climate of eco-transparency. That’s the danger in companies buying a place at the table to sway standards and evaluations in their favor.

On the other hand, if such a sustainability index is truly objective and comes into wide use in the marketplace, its positive impacts would be profound. Analysis of transparency systems by the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Transparency Policy Project established three criteria for transparency systems: they should be authoritative, impartial, and comprehensive.

Two transparency product-rating systems already operate staunchly following these principles. SkinDeep, a website that ranks personal care products for potential toxicity, searches for each of a products’ listed ingredient in medical databases to see if they might, for example, cause cancer in lab mice, disrupt the endocrine system in fetuses, or play a role in other biological maladies. The system itself is transparent; any user can dig down to find how the ratings were arrived at.

GoodGuide aggregates databases like SkinDeep’s into a single score. It rates tens of thousands of consumer goods and foods (and the companies that make them) on their environmental, health, and social impacts. GoodGuide, too, offers transparency to users (though a few of the databases remain “black box”).

Neither SkinDeep nor GoodGuide are for-profit ventures, and both fiercely protect their independence. GoodGuide’s founder Dara O’Rourke tells me that more and more companies are coming to him asking for help in rethinking their brands to make them more desirable in a greening marketplace. O’Rourke says, “They’re often shocked when they realize we are not some consulting company that they can hire to massage our data or lower our standards to give them a better rating.”

GoodGuide has begun to offer companies the ecological equivalent of Google Analytics for websites: an analysis of why a given product or the company as a whole ranks as it does, what the worst impacts are, and suggestions for upgrading their policies or processes to get a better ranking.

Other strategies for meeting the need for transparent, impartial ratings include industry-wide disclosure of ecological impacts. An article in Chemical and Engineering News shows how such a proposed green certification standard for the chemical industry would see full disclosure on product labels akin to the familiar food nutrition panels. A notebook computer, for example, would have a label listing its carbon footprint, recycled content, power use, heavy metals, and chemicals that are candidates for phasing out under the rigorous assessments of chemical toxicity being undertaken by the EU.

“The world of marketing is changing,” a marketing consultant tells me. “Brands are desperate to control how they’re evaluated, but you can’t just buy the score you want. You’ve got to make the smarter choices that will earn a better rating.”

Meanwhile, marketplace ecological transparency continues to increase. Some retailers are in conversation with GoodGuide about putting its ratings next to the price tags of products on their shelves. Others are starting to use GoodGuide ratings as a screen in deciding which products to stock. But the prize for truly going green will go to the first company to put GoodGuide ratings right on their own products. That will raise the product-greening competitive bar for everyone.

Originally published at Harvard Business Review

Sustainability is the biggest business opportunity in 50 years – it’s starting now, and the landscape will never be the same. Some managers clearly see their chance to be ahead of this curve. The single biggest challenge facing them now is creating alignment – explaining their vision in a compelling, motivational way – to get from the conceptual stage to critical action.

• Getting key decision-makers on board, and to take the next steps
• Avoiding common errors of sustainability advocates
• Finding and bridging gaps in mental models
• Building hybrid synthesis with NGOs, governments, and other businesses

Peter Senge is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning, a global community of corporations, researchers, and consultants committed to increase our capacity to collectively realize our highest aspirations and productively resolve our differences through the mutual development of people and institutions. The Journal of Business Strategy named him a “Strategist of the Century.” His books include the seminal The Fifth Discipline and his newest book on sustainability, The Necessary Revolution.

Just weeks after Wal-Mart’s announcement, the Harvard Business Review featured a cover story proclaiming that sustainability has become the key to successful corporate strategy. The article, co-authored by the University of Michigan-based strategy maven C.K. Prahalad, proclaimed that the next business model must be green and touted ecological innovation as the coming driver of economic growth.

Wal-Mart has handed the environmental movement a new tool for ameliorating the human footprint: using an emerging generation of information systems to create market pressures to upgrade the ecological performance of commerce and industry. This strategy entails making life-cycle-assessment data for products transparent — that is, labeling them with a sound, independent rating so shoppers can easily take the ecological impacts into account as they decide what to buy.

Indeed, the Wal-Mart announcement has thrust what once seemed merely an intriguing idea into a market reality companies will have to deal with — not just in tomorrow’s strategic plans, but in today’s logistics and operations. Wal-Mart’s 100,000-plus suppliers (and the likes of Procter & Gamble counts as just one) will be required to reveal their products’ ecological impacts or have them dropped from the retailer’s stores worldwide.

“A year ago I was just beginning to talk with folks at Wal-Mart about the concept of life-cycle assessment,” says Gregory Norris, an industrial ecologist who teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Harvard School of Public Health. “Now they are using the tools to do pilot life-cycle assessments on their own products. This has gone from talk to action.”

Norris heads the development of Earthster, an open-source information system designed to evaluate a product’s life-cycle assessment relative to industry norms and help suppliers and bulk buyers to spot ecological upgrades that will improve the product’s rating. Norris, a member of the Sustainability Consortium that Wal-Mart has partnered with, envisions Earthster as capable of creating industry averages for a given product, enabling manufacturers spot where they need to improve and helping companies find suppliers who can offer upgrades on a given ecological impact.

A pilot project now underway with Earthster involves seven products from Wal-Mart. The intention is to make the system scalable, so that one day all items in Wal-Mart’s aisles will have a sustainability rating, starting with the retailer’s 3,500 house brands. “We expect usage to scale exponentially by next year,” says Norris. “Because Wal-Mart has so much influence, other big companies are looking into this, too.”

Roughly 20 percent of factories in China are said to be somewhere in the supply chain for Wal-Mart’s suppliers. “If this comes to the Wal-Mart supply chain,” Norris comments, “it’s on its way to the global economy.”

The index will produce a sustainability rating label that retailers will post as a single number or symbol next to an item’s price tag. The Sustainability Consortium, which is developing the index and is centered at Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas, envisions the system as a new industrial standard, one that many retailers beyond Wal-Mart will adopt, and that companies and other organizational purchasers will use in business-to-business buys.

A prototype for just such a sustainability index is already in operation: GoodGuide.com, launched earlier this year, aggregates more than 200 databases — from the global warming evaluations of companies compiled by ClimateCounts, to government listings of toxic chemicals — into a single rating on a 10-point scale.

The advantage of an all-in-one rating is this: say you’re buying a wood product that has won Forest Stewardship Council approval — but you also want to know how it rates on chemicals of concern, how workers are treated, and its carbon footprint. GoodGuide, developed by a team led by industrial ecologist Dara O’Rourke of the University of California at Berkeley, tells you all that, and much more — either in a single summative score (on a 1 to 10 scale), or broken down into sub-ratings in environmental, health, and social categories — and, if you’re determined to dig down to details, with transparency about how the ratings were arrived at. So far GoodGuide rates 70,000 or so individual products, with more in the pipeline.

According to O’Rourke, GoodGuide.com has had more than two million web users since its launch in October of 2008. A survey reported at a September meeting of the Grocery Manufacturers Association found even during the economic downturn two-thirds of shoppers say they now find it more important to purchase products with health and environmental benefits.

O’Rourke has found himself invited to speak at a succession of business and industry meetings to explain the new ecological transparency systems. “My message to them is: ‘This is coming. Wal-Mart’s involvement is the biggest proof this is going mainstream,’” O’Rourke told me. “In the last two months we’ve been getting more and more calls from big retailers wanting us to let them put our ratings on their products — especially house brands,” which typically have double the profit margin of other products.

Such eco-rating systems exemplify a coming wave of radical transparency that could culminate in products’ competing not just on price and quality, but on their total ecological impact as assessed in life-cycle-assessment ratings. This could finally bring ecological impacts into the value equation for products.

Perhaps the most surprising development is the turnabout in businesses’ embrace of transparency about ecological impacts (or at least some businesses — there also remains widespread skepticism, if not outright fear, of transparency). “Wal-Mart was considered the most secretive retailer,” O’Rourke says, “but now they’re saying the only way forward is the path of openness.”
Historically there has always been a vast information asymmetry, with consumers knowing next to nothing about the true ecological impacts of what they buy. Ecological transparency hands that once-hidden information to shoppers. The information systems fostering marketplace ecological transparency are disruptive technologies, promising to be a game-changer both for business and for environmental, public health, and social activists of many stripes.

One scenario: As the cost of compiling and indexing this previously hidden information drops to zero, the ratings will sway the shopping decisions of substantial numbers of consumers — as well as business-to-business and institutional buyers — shifting market share toward ecologically superior products, thus making winners of brands that compete best on the ecological merits, along with price and quality.

This, in turn, could trigger a virtuous cycle where this crucial information at the point-of-purchase impels companies to upgrade the impacts of their business practices in an ongoing process of improvement. And this game change for business could resolve the longstanding debate within companies about sustainability, where some voices argue for social responsibility and others counter that there is just no business case to justify changing. While there are exceptional, progressive companies, the best most businesses have done is to pursue sustainability only to the extent it immediately helps their bottom line — for example, by finding cost savings from energy efficiencies.

The big switch will come as executives see that the top line now benefits with more sales for ecologically superior products. Then the smart business strategy will include a perpetual upgrade, where companies actively search for points in the life-cycle assessment of a product and where an improvement in a supplier or source — or in a chemical or other ingredient, industrial platform, or process — could give their product a better ecological impact score.

All this promises to accelerate the demand for innovations across the entire range of ecological impacts from industry, transportation, and retailing. Andy Ruben, formerly the head of Wal-Mart’s sustainability initiative and
now head of its house brands division, has called such entrepreneurial inventiveness the “biggest business opportunity of the next 50 years,” one that could potentially go way beyond the current boost to green energy from federal stimulus money.

For environmental groups, this sea change can make allies of businesses that were once seen as adversaries, creating a common agenda. Already the Nature Conservancy has consulted with a global oil company on how to manage a huge holding in Wyoming in ways that leave crucial ecosystems in optimal shape. Coca-Cola turned to expertise from the World Wildlife Fund to better understand its water footprint, and how to be lighter in the impact of its usage. Such working alliances, where academic and nonprofit expertise joins with business ventures to lessen ecological impacts, will make increasing sense in a radically transparent future.

Industrial ecologists — who focus on sustainable approaches that integrate environmental, technical and social factors — may find themselves suddenly in the spotlight, as ecological transparency highlights for business the importance of the discipline itself and primes demand for its services. As industrial ecology transitions from offering high-fee, proprietary life-cycle assessments to doing more open-source ones in the service of a virtuous cycle, the field may well take on new cachet and draw a flood of talented people who see it as a way to find work in keeping with their values.

Only time will tell if vehicles like the Sustainability Index or GoodGuide will one day be used by enough shoppers and big buyers to matter in these ways. Wal-Mart executives point to survey data suggesting that younger people — those born from the 1980s on — are far more motivated to shop for a better planet than any past generation. An increasing number of institutional buyers already have mandates for more ecologically sound purchases, so these rating systems could readily be used as lenses on suppliers.

But can information systems really create a new level of buyer awareness that will reach critical marketplace mass? I was at the New York Times as a science journalist when the Internet was launched, and if anyone had said then that one day this new kid on the block would threaten the paper’s very existence, they would have met only scorn. We’ll see.

Originally posted at environment360

To get a feel for where the green building marketplace might head one day, go to GoodGuide.com and look up any of the 75,000 consumer products they rate, from air fresheners to yogurt. GoodGuide aggregates more than 200 technical databases into a ten-point scale to rank products—and the companies that make them—on their environmental, health, and social impacts. Some of the databases evaluate items over their entire life cycle, from the extraction or harvesting of their contents through manufacture all the way to disposal. In an instant you can compare the ecological virtue or negatives of any product to all of its competitors.

Imagine if some day a parallel rating system existed for buildings, one that rolled up all the ecological impacts of the materials over their entire life cycle and combined those with the impacts of building opera-tions. Such an evaluation would add breadth to LEED ratings by including more dimensions of ecological impacts. Like GoodGuide, the system would have to be independent, verifiable, and transparent.

There are signs of a growing demand for such transparency in green building. When Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest health maintenance organization, undertook to build millions of square feet of hospitals, they asked the Healthy Building Network, with its expertise in avoiding toxins in building materials, to help them go beyond simply minimizing volatile organic compounds from carpets and flooring.

“Kaiser looked to us, for example, to assess the materials in a carpet to avoid phthalates in the backing. Phthalates are endocrine disruptors, bronchial irritants, and asthma triggers,” says Tom Lent, a director of the network. “You need to look at all the industrial chemicals used in building materials and match them to medical hazards.”

Such fine-grained evaluation of the impacts of material typifies life-cycle assessment (or LCA), the method used by industrial ecologists to evaluate the gamut of an item’s ecological plusses and minuses. To be sure, LCAs themselves need some improvement. For one, they are very crude in how they address health issues from materials, like the phthalates in carpets.

An example can be seen in Energy-Star ratings, where a wall-mounted digital display screen might look highly energy efficient, but such thin-slice data misrepresents the overall picture. More than 90 percent of its environmental impact occurs during manufacture and disposal, according to Dara O’Rourke, an industrial ecologist at the University of California at Berkeley. An LCA would reveal impacts beyond the use stage.  In theory, LCAs can generate a level of information that allows an architect to make more informed choices. LEED standards have brought ecological transparency where there was little or none before. But in some ways LEED ratings represent a black box that’s not easily penetrated.

The LEED governing group has begun using LCA evaluations to inform their green-building standards. Taking LEED certification to this next phase would present a better picture of a building’s cumulative ecological impacts. “We are proponents of radical transparency for architects, so they can drill down to find the data behind the claims,” says Lent. “The green-building world is peppered with labels but sparse on transparency.” “LEED is a first step,” commented Pedro Vieira, a member of the Consortium on Green Design at the University of California at Berkeley. “But it only touches the surface. [In theory] you can do an LCA of a building, assessing all the individual materials, water and energy used, as well as the logistics of producing them.”

Article originally posted at greensource.construction.com

Regulatory and litigation risks have become familiar, and most companies have learned to avoid or manage them. The new kid on the block — reputation risk — may grow to be the most important for many businesses. One big reason? With Wal-Mart’s announcement in July that it is working with an academic consortium to develop a sustainability index for rating products, a never-seen-before level of transparency seems headed for their stores. Other retailers like Safeway and Best Buy are showing interest in adopting a similar rating.

Here’s the way the ecological transparency index seems likely to work. Wal-Mart’s house brand division is already piloting seven existing products, asking suppliers to assess those products on four dimensions of sustainability: resource use, including nonrenewables; impact on climate change; impact on ecosystems throughout the product’s supply chain; and impact on human health. Data like this, apparently, will become the basis for sustainability ratings that will be posted so shoppers can compare brands in the store aisles.

One model for such point-of-purchase comparisons already exists: www.GoodGuide.com, which aggregates more than 200 such databases to rate companies and products on environmental, health, and social impacts. These include not just the greenhouse gas outputs of the company but also dozens of registries of “chemicals of concern” like BPA and phthalates (both of which are on the recent list announced by the EPA of industrial chemicals that will no longer be allowed in consumer products). More than 60,000 personal care, food, and toy products are now rated on a ten-point scale, standing as proof-of-concept for Wal-Mart’s sustainability index.

Unveiling the ecological impacts of products to consumers will likely create instant winners and losers. Signs in store aisles would be much more effective than online systems, and this point-of-purchase comparison sets the stage for what psychologists call the “contrast effect.” The discovery that your child’s toy contains a toxic substance like lead activates disgust — and the toxin-free toy you are comparing it with looks all the better.

Investors can predict how shifts in brand preference could quickly scale, hurting some brands and improving others.

“Just as consumers have had myopia on the ecological impacts of products, investors do regarding these risks,” says Mark Tulay, director of People4Earth, a nonprofit organization. Tulay’s group has begun to establish a global standard for investors to assess sustainability-related risks and opportunities. The ratings include product health and safety, labor practices, the impacts of operations on the environment and biodiversity, and output of greenhouse gases.

Businesses vary widely in their preparedness for reputation risk. As one Wal-Mart executive told me, “I wonder about the future of companies who, when we tell them we want data on their carbon footprint, answer, ‘Carb-what?’”

The dilemma for most companies is that the standard industrial platforms, processes, and chemicals in daily use were developed in the era before companies and consumers were aware of the ecological dangers they could cause.

Adapting to reputation risk will require a new mindset. Take a paper company that has excellent practices in its mills — lower chlorine use, good wastewater systems, alternative energy use, and the like. But the company still sources its wood from virgin forests — a practice that will make it a laggard if its competitors no longer use virgin wood.

To become less susceptible to this new risk, investors might favor companies that use life cycle assessment to identify the impact profile of their products, benchmark those scores against industry averages, and find innovative solutions that raise their ecological scores in the marketplace. One useful tool in development is Earthster, a supply chain management tool designed to help companies do just that — including identify new suppliers with the needed ecological solutions.

Wal-Mart is already working with Greg Norris, developer of Earthster, on pilot analyses of the seven house brands I mentioned earlier. Earthster aims to create an open source information commons that sets sector-by-sector standards for sustainability scores. Companies will be able to use Earthster to compare their own goods to industry averages, diagnose their worst impacts — and then focus R&D or suppliers to improve where it will help their overall sustainability ratings the most.

Lowering sustainability risks that in turn can affect long-term profitability and growth potential has become a mandate at an increasing number of companies. The Sustainable Investment Research Analyst Network (SIRAN) reported in July that annual reports from 86 of the 100 largest publicly traded U.S. companies include sustainability initiatives, and 34 report measurable goals.

Investors are taking note. The Investor Network on Climate Risk has 80-plus members representing over $60 trillion (including BlackRock and CalPERS). While climate concerns have been at the forefront for investors like these, social sustainability — such as how workers are treated — has been an additional focus of late. And as new ecological transparency systems come online, that focus will most certainly broaden.

Investors can minimize their exposure to the risk of supporting companies more likely to lose in this reputation battle. “What’s been missing is what we are all working towards: meaningful metrics on the climate impacts at the product level,” says People4Earth’s Tulay, adding that this is what life cycle assessment systems like Earthster and GoodGuide seek to capture and quantify. Tulay adds, “Investors should demand ecological transparency from companies.”

Full article originally posted at harvardbusiness.org

In the Forward I go on to explain that the misinterpretation stems from estimates that IQ accounts for around 20 percent of success in careers. This leaves 80 percent unaccounted for. But this does not mean emotional intelligence explains the rest of career success. As I wrote in Emotional Intelligence, a wide range of elements, from family wealth and education, to simple luck – including emotional intelligence to some degree –and many more factors are at play. Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book Outliers argues for chance opportunity as one such.

“Another common misconception,” I wrote in the Forward, takes the form of recklessly applying the importance of emotional intelligence to domains where it matters far less than IQ – academic achievement being the most obvious. When it comes to career success, the picture is more nuanced. IQ scores are the best predictor of what career rung we can manage. That’s what they were designed to do; IQ tests were first widely applied in sorting into the right specialty and rank millions of American soldiers during World War I.

But when it comes to predicting who among a talented pool of candidates within an intellectually demanding profession will emerge as an effective leader, IQ loses is predictive power. This is partly due to the “floor effect,” where in order to enter the top echelons of a given profession or large organization everyone has already been sifted for IQ. At those levels a relatively high IQ becomes a threshold ability – what you need to enter and stay in the game.

In my 1998 book Working with Emotional Intelligence I proposed that EI-based abilities more often than IQ-type abilities or technical skills are the discriminating competencies that predict who among a group of very smart people will lead most ably. This is a key point for anyone running an organization who must decide what abilities to look for in potential leaders.  One methodology used in industrial/organizational psychology to make this judgment is called “competence modeling,” which contrasts highly effective leaders with mediocre ones, and determines what specific abilities the stars display that the others lack.

Organizations around the world use the competence modeling method to make personnel decisions, performing independent analyses of their own employees. As I wrote in the Forward, if you scan these competency models, “you discover that IQ and technical skills drop toward the bottom of the list the higher the position” (though they remain stronger predictors of excellence in lower-rung jobs). Competence models for leadership typically consist of anywhere from 80 to 100 percent EI-based abilities.”

I inadvertently may have added to the confusion about EI as a factor in success when I summarized this competence data in ways that were misconstrued as claiming that EI (I generally don’t use the term “EQ”) is more powerful in predicting career success than IQ. Once I realized that people did not understand the limited context and correct basis of this statement, I gave more qualifying information. Still, some press accounts and other secondary sources continue to misrepresent my views, as Po Bronson has done here.

Another point relates to the contrast between executive function and emotional intelligence. Po Bronson seems to say that executive function and emotional intelligence are in some kind of competition as concepts. Actually I would argue they are partly overlapping constructs. My model of emotional intelligence elaborates four domains of ability: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and interpersonal skill. The first two – self-awareness and self-regulation — are themselves elements of executive function, all of which are based in the operations of zones of the prefrontal cortex. Indeed, in writing about self-regulation in my 1995 book Emotional Intelligence I cite the work of Walter Mischel and his now-famous marshmallow test with four-year-olds, which assessed their ability to manage impulsivity and delay gratification – two key indicators of executive function. I would expect executive function and emotional intelligence (at least as described in my model – perhaps not with Salovey and Mayer’s) to correlate strongly with EF. That’s a question for further research.

Po also misrepresents curricula in social/emotional learning as a waste of time.  An article by University of Illinois psychologist Roger Weissberg and colleagues at the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning, now in press in the journal Child Development, reports on a meta-analysis of more than 200 studies comparing students who had the program with those who do not. The results, as presented in an earlier version of this paper: The programs reduce violence and other antisocial behavior by around 10% and enhance positive behaviors like paying attention in class by the same margin – and benefits are greatest in schools that need it the most. Most intriguing, academic achievement test scores go up around 11 percent. That sounds like a program anyone would want their children to benefit from.

Another odd notion put forward by Po is that Peter Salovey represents the academic side of emotional intelligence and I represent the commercial side. I do not sell any product or service related to EI. The sole exception: like Peter Salovey I have co-authored an assessment tool for EI (this is standard practice among psychologists; the various IQ tests embody differing theories of intelligence and how to measure it and are designed by the theorist). Our assessment tools are available only to professionals. Salovey’s is recognized as the flagship general measure of EI; mine is the ESCI, designed specifically for leadership development. Both Peter (I consider him a friend) and I are members of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, based at Rutgers. Our hope for the field is that rigorous research will more sharply define the EI construct, its correlates and its practical applications, all based on empirical data. That’s the way science grows and evolves. But good science takes time. Give it a decade, Po, and let’s revisit these issues.

My pleasure at picturing his delight at the toy car melted into something between disgust and outrage. That nifty toy sits on my desk months after I bought it.

Call it eco-angst, the moment a new bit of unpleasant ecological information about some product or other plunges us into a moment (or more) of despair at the planet’s condition and the fragility of our place on it.

Eco-angst, it turns out, is but one version of a widely studied psychological phenomenon, one well-known in the world of retailing. Take a bargain bin cabernet, tell people it’s an expensive, estate-bottled varietal, and they’ll tell you they like it. They’ll even linger longer over their dinner, enjoying not just the wine but the rest of their food more. Now describe the same wine as a low-end variety from North Dakota, and they’ll tell you it’s not so good — and finish their meal faster, enjoying it less.

The difference lies, of course, in the perception, not the reality. The emotional power of this perceptual skew has been documented in experiments not just with wines, but even pain relievers — the more expensive ones always seem better. Mindset drives our experience of a product, a fact known intuitively by advertisers long before the era of “Mad Men.” Back in the 1920s, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, became an influential pioneer of public relations by capitalizing on the power of psychological manipulation of the public to sell products. Advertising and psychology have been intertwined ever since.

What’s more, brain imaging now reveals that tasting what we think is a high-end wine produces heightened activity in a key strip of neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex, which lights up during moments of keen interest — a pattern some neuroeconomists see as the brain signature for brand preference. The “low-end” wine, on the other hand elicits not a budge in orbitofrontal chatter, a pattern indicating disinterest or disgust. (Study data can b found here.)

The neural signature for disgust may soon become more prevalent in the aisles of stores with the advent of heightened transparency about the ecological impacts of retail products like deodorants, foods and toys. A new generation of information systems has begun to offer detailed evaluations of once-hidden ecological impacts for tens of thousands of items, and the picture is not always pretty.

Eco-angst dawns with the discovery that some children’s sunblock contains a chemical that becomes a carcinogen when exposed to the sun, or that the company that makes a popular organic yogurt operates in ways that result in significantly more greenhouse gases than their competitors. The moral here, or course, is not to stop using sunblock nor to give up yogurt, but to choose the brands without these downsides.

Such distasteful information has predictable consequences for marketing, particularly if the eye-opening data comes at the moment we’re comparing two brands. Psychologists call it the “contrast effect”: as Item A suddenly looks bad, we get an even stronger preference for Item B. It is also a marketing boon for products that do no harm.

Eco-angst among consumers may soon spread as information about products is increasing easy to get. GoodGuide.com, is a Web site (with its own iPhone application) that instantly compares any of 75,000 consumer products on their environmental, health, and social impacts. Another Web site, SkinDeep.com, analyzes every ingredient in personal care products to match them with findings from medical databases; it ranks, for example, more than a thousand shampoos on their likely levels of toxicity.

The blockbuster for ecological transparency was the announcement in July by Wal-Mart that they are developing a similar sustainability index with the help of an academic consortium. One day shoppers, it seems, will get ecological ratings of products along with price in Wal-Mart (and likely other major retailers as well) as they stroll the aisles.

These rating systems herald the death of “greenwashing,” the advertising sleight-of-hand that plucks a single virtue from a multitude of a product’s ecological impacts and touts its environmental goodness. We will no longer be impressed by an organic T-shirt if its cotton was grown by hogging water in an arid and impoverished land, or if its dye puts workers at heightened risk for leukemia, or if it was stitched together in a sweatshop where young women suffer from needless injuries.

Industrial ecology, the fledgling discipline that renders precise analyzes of the multitude of ecological impacts any manmade item has over its life cycle, tells us that there is little or nothing manufactured today that nature loves. Ours is an age of eco-angst because virtually all our industrial platforms, processes and chemicals were developed in a day when people were oblivious to their ecological impacts.

It’s not that no one cared — no one really knew. Industrial ecology has only come of age in the last decade or two, and has yet to make its findings widely known. But as ecological transparency comes to the aisles of stores near you and me, it opens an opportunity for us to vote with our dollars with unprecedented precision for better ecological impacts.

Rather than taking the ascetic route of “No Impact Man,” we can together become high impact shoppers, tipping market share to products with gentler ecological imprints. But to do so we need to face the often unattractive truths behind the making of our favorite stuff, and so risk a stiff dose of disgust.

Originally posted at The New York Times

Then I talked to Dara O’Rourke, who spent years roaming the floors of factories throughout the Third World as a watchdog on behalf of agencies like UNESCO. O’Rourke tells me that garment workers are most likely to get injuries like gashes around two in the morning, when weariness and poor lighting combine with missing equipment safety guards. Why are the lights so dim and safeguards missing? And why are they working through the wee hours of the night in the first place? So you and I can buy low-priced knock-offs of what walked down the runways of Milan just a few months before.

Another downer. O’Rourke also tells me he stopped using a children’s sunblock on his five-year-old daughter the day he learned it contained a chemical that becomes a carcinogen when exposed to sunlight.

Call it “eco-angst,” the sickly sense that comes as a cost of learning the actual environmental, health and social consequences of all the stuff we buy and use every day. In the course of research for my book Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Cost of What We Buy can Change Everything, I learned an ever-expanding litany of such tales of ecological distress.

My daily read now includes an email blast from AboveTheFold, which monitors world media for alarms like the pending approval in California of methyl iodide, a suspected carcinogen, as a pesticide; or the report from an international neuroxicology conference in Jerusalem that far too few of the 80,000 industrial chemicals in daily use have been fully tested for safety. Another source, e360, from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science, skims scientific research to report, for instance, that a 60-member expert panel concludes chemicals added to plastics disrupt endocrine function and fetal development, plastic debris floating in oceans can last thousands of years and clog the digestive system of fish, and plastics in the nation’s landfills leach harmful chemicals into groundwater.

As such once-hidden industrial impacts are becoming open information an ecological awareness dawns: the realization that you, me, and everyone we know are unwitting accomplices in one or another disturbing drama much of the time we shop.

But now relief for eco-angst seems on the way, and from an unlikely source: WalMart. The retailer recently announced the development of a sustainability index that will rate the products it carries on their ecological impacts. Everything from diapers and detergents to xBoxes will be held accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions and toxic chemical use; the health, wages, and rights of workers; and a host of other previously hidden consequences of manufacture, transport and disposal. WalMart hopes one day to share the system with other retailers like Target and Cosco.

Both Dara O’Rourke and Gregory Norris, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Arkansas, are part of the consortium helping WalMart design their transapency index, which will launch in a few years. But a ready anodyne for eco-angst can be seen in O’Rourke’s website www.GoodGuide.com that rates upwards of 75,000 consumer products on a ten-point scale that instantly lets you compare your detergent or sunblock with all the others on their relative virtue. O’Rourke, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, led the development of GoodGuide, which extracts its ratings via a complex calculus involving more than 200 databases. Want to know why one prominent national brand of “organic” milk gets a mediocre score? Drill down into the database and discover how the company’s industrial-style dairy lots are environmental disasters.

GoodGuide, like other such ecological rating systems, lets us vote with our dollars for the better choice. Once I bypassed the cod, Norris guided me to order the arctic char, raised in an inland fish farm where they do less harm than such operations in an ocean. O’Rourke switched brands of children’s sunblock, but also emailed the company whose product he abandoned to tell them about the problematic ingredient, saying he’d come back if they dropped it.

Then there’s the fashion industry where time- and cost-saving pressures in the supply chain too often mean somewhere along the way a sweatshop endangers its workers to get us cheaper clothes more quickly. One solution might be a “slow fashion” movement, akin to that for food, which favors clothes with at least a sweatshop-free pedigree, if not an outright artisanal heritage.

Gregory Norris, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health and the University of Arkansas, heads the development of Earthster, a software system that allows companies to track the ecological impacts of a given product all along its supply chain to find better alternatives. As radical transparency tools like GoodGuide and WalMart’s sustainability index help us shift market share to favor better alternatives, Earthster can help companies find the upgrades that will keep our business.

So I see an antidote for eco-angst: marketplace transparency that lets the buyosphere help repair the biosphere.

The retailer’s 100,000 suppliers around the world will have to calculate and disclose the total ecological costs of their products — and that data will be boiled down into a single rating that shoppers will see right next to the price tag. For consumers, this will drop to zero the “effort cost” of finding an item’s ecological impacts, which today often means digging through a confusing forest of rating systems online, then trying to recall that information while strolling the aisles of a store.

As consumer surveys have shown for years, only a small portion, maybe ten percent, of shoppers are passionate about shopping their values; around 25 percent couldn’t care less. The action is the two-thirds in the middle, who say they would value shop if they didn’t have to make any extra effort, and if prices are comparable. And Wal-Mart has the knack for keeping costs down.

The sustainability index will be built from answers to detailed questions about impacts that range from a company’s greenhouse gas emissions and solid waste reduction targets to worker’s wages and human rights — and positive contributions to the local community. Third party certifications will be built into the system. As the 900-pound gorilla of retail presses its suppliers for greener products, it is also inviting other huge retailers like Target and Cosco to adopt the same sustainability index. That will simplify things for both suppliers and consumers. And as more and more major retailers join in, we will see a growing business imperative for perpetually upgrading the ecological impacts of consumer products.

The value chain concept gauges how each step in a product’s life adds to its worth. But value can be seen from another angle, as embodied in the index: all the environmental, health, and social impacts of a product throughout its life cycle. By creating a single standard for evaluation, Wal-Mart opens a window on products that reveals any negatives — what might be called the “devalue chain” — and puts them into competitive play.

The strategic value of these metrics is that every negative value offers a potential for upgrading, as each upgrade improves the item’s overall score. Assessing the ecological pluses and minuses throughout a product’s life cycle offers a metric for business decisions that will boost the pluses and lessen the minuses.

The new metrics Wal-Mart imposes on its suppliers suggest a performance standard for ecological impacts all along the supply chain and throughout a product’s life cycle. This reinvents “green” as a process, not a static label, a verb rather than an adjective. To stay competitive in this arena, companies need to think of themselves as greening, continually looking for ways to improve their ecological footprint.

Andy Ruben was appointed by Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott as the first vice president of the company’s sustainability initiative. Now he heads Wal-Mart’s private brand sourcing strategy; we spoke while I was writing Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. His perspective, as quoted in the book, was telling:

“To me, all negative impacts of products are a discovery about unintended consequences. There can be thousands of consequences from a single decision, and we may be seeing just ten of these unintended impacts. The most competitive companies will engage to uncover these unnoticed impacts and make better decisions. Simply put, they will become more competitive by seeing their business in a broader light.”

The potential business upside here for upgrade innovations is enormous. As Ruben also told me, “This is the largest strategic opportunity companies will see for the next 50 years. This is the most exciting time to be in business, with more opportunity to create change in the world than ever.”

Originally posted at HarvardBusiness.org