In today’s world green products are popping up everywhere.  In addition, some pretty green washed products are showing up as well.  That is where the beta site of GoodGuide comes in. 

GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.

With GoodGuide, You Can…

• Find Safe, Healthy & Green Products that protect you and your family.
• Search or Browse over 60,000 Personal Care & Household Chemical Products, and see what’s really beneath the label.
• Get Expert Advice & Recommendations on products and quickly learn the impacts of what you buy.
• Find better products, and make purchasing decisions based on what’s important to you.
• Create a personalized Shopping List with the products that are right for you & your family.

Good Guide is a great idea that fills a much needed demand. They have rated over 60,000 products in categories that range from mens toiletries to laundry detergent and everything in between.  By searching the site you can find which of your products carry the highest ratings and make product change decisions based on the ratings. 

So where do they get the ratings? 

From the site: 

Different types of information flow into GoodGuide’s system: absolute measures, relative measures, and binary measures. Absolute measures describe measurable activities of a company or product. For example, the pounds of toxic air emissions released per year, the CEO’s salary, or the amount of money a company donated to charity. Relative measures are scores, such as a numerical grade of “6.5 out of 10″ or a textual grade of “bad” to “excellent.” Binary (or Yes/No) measures indicate whether a product or company does or does not have specific characteristics. For example, a product may or may not have earned an environmental certification, or a company may or may not test its products on animals.

These measures are then used to create GoodGuide’s ratings. To calculate a single rating for a product or company, we convert all of the existing measures into a 0 to 10 score. In GoodGuide’s system, a score of 10 is the best and a score of 0 is the worst. Products and companies are rated relative to the performance of similar products or companies in the same industry. Read more on the ratings here.

Source:  GoodGuide