kuniform

Wow. Troika blew me away (pun intended) with this amazing cloud. See a great writeup on the technology behind it at PixelSumo.

Nathan Shedroff links off to Reveal Info, which looks like an attempt to begin bubbling forward the energy and materials costs involved in the lifecycle of a product. Great idea, and necessary.

The big challenge to me is: outside of companies who have high scores in these attributes, what is the incentive for companies to publish these attributes. There is a market of people who are concerned about buying responsibly, and there is a market of people who don’t care and want to buy based on price. Typically, these two markets don’t overlap, or, if they do, the products that serve the needs are sometimes very different. We’ll call them ‘Greenies’ and ‘Pricers’.

Let’s look at t-shirts. A t-shirt with high scores in terms of social justice, human rights, and responsible lifecycle in today’s economy will be higher priced than that produced with the cheapest commodity cotton and slave labor. Having confidence that their money is actually buying the right thing is probably important to the Greenies. To the Pricers, it’s a nice to have, but won’t affect their decision making process.

Now, let’s look at cleaning supplies. In a lot of cases, cleaning supplies can be replaced by items like vinegar, which may actually be cheaper. Something like RevealInfo may not help make an apples to apples comparison, nor does it effectively channel consumer behavior.

The fact RevealInfo doesn’t do those things is a sign of a strength, not a weakness. Instead of being all things to everyone, it seems like they are probably targeting products more like clothing, and less where sustainability is achieved through abandoning some of the ‘new and improved’ products of modernity.

Again, I can’t wait to see it live!