How do we rate sustainable brands on the Green Salon Directory?
Over the summer, we’ve been revising and updating the Green Salon methodology. Working with sustainability experts around the world, we’ve come up with a more detailed analysis which now requires brands to be publishing more information about how green they are - and we look for that information to be easily available to all of us consumers. Think of us as a greenwash filter - doing the work so that you don’t have to!
Daylesford Organic scored 70% in our new rating system - great work!
We’ve had a busy summer at Green Salon. We teamed up with a number of sustainability experts and a group of highly-motivated and engaged students from Oxford University to give our methodology an update. The sustainability space is moving at such a pace that our methodology, first written in 2021, needed a refresh to keep it bang up-to-date. Our goal was to get as close as we could to the consumer perspective. As consumers are becoming more sustainability savvy, we wanted to support them in this journey by making it as easy as possible to find out which brands are pulling ahead in the race to be green - and which are falling behind.
So we’ve doubled down on our focus on transparency. We’ve also become more demanding in terms of the level of third party verification we expect brands to have for their claims, and are putting even more of an onus on speedy decarbonisation, regenerative principles and circularity.
We’ve also made the decision to rank brands according to how green they are. So that you the consumer can decide how green you want to go!
Here’s a guide to our new rating system:
1000s of hours have been spent revising & utilising our new rating system. Here’s how we rate each brand and what that means.
How do we assess brands?
From the very start of Green Salon, we’ve believed that green brands in the 2020s need to approach sustainability in the round. It’s not enough to be producing a “sustainable line” while the bulk of the business is business-as-usual. While other directories look at individual aspects of a company - shop vegan, for instance, or cruelty free - we take a different approach. We look at all aspects of the brand and determine how green the company is from how it produces items, to how it distributes them and even what it does with them when the consumer has finished with them.
Let’s take an example. Bower Collective* is a refillable household brand, producing bathroom and beauty products, that are free of synthetic chemicals. Its ethos is to do no harm to the plant, and our bodies, through avoiding potentially harmful chemicals, and to make sure that you never have to throw away any single-use plastic again. To do this, it sends its liquid products in plastic pouches, along with a stamped-addressed envelope, so when you’re done with the pouches you send them back to be refilled, and the cycle starts again.
One of the biggest issues that brands face is the cost of being a sustainable brand. While High Street brands cut costs by externalising those costs on the planet, we have now got to the point that the planet can no longer absorb those costs without a huge amount of harm through climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution.
We’re very alive to the fact that unlike High Street brands, green brands have set out to absorb those costs. So to make sure that the smaller green brands do not put themselves out of business by over-extending on certifications and verifications, we’ve taken the decision to impose a sliding scale on our scoring system, with bigger brands being expected to have done more. And the younger, smaller brands excused from ticking some of those boxes until they’ve grown.
We’re interested in finding out from you, the consumer, what expectations you have of green brands, both big and small. How important is to you that they are reducing their carbon emissions, getting rid of plastic and regenerating the soil, oceans and seas? What size of brand do you expect to be taking action on all fronts? And to what extent are you prepared to spend a bit more to support smaller brands that might be racing ahead of bigger brands to achieve the greatest positive impact?
So what are the Green Salon criteria?
Originally, our analysis of brands aimed to be holistic but succinct. This time, we’ve gone deeper and been more granular in our data analysis. In consultation with sustainability experts, our criteria has grown from 30 criteria to over 70. Within these questions we are checking sustainable brands to assess how well they score in minimising their impact on the planet, people and animals - and how innovative they are in terms of sustainability, circularity and regeneration. With a new system in place to track the harmful actions a brand may be taking alongside their potential positive impact, we’re now getting an even more extensive view of a brand’s ethos.
Here’s an overview of what we’re looking for in a sustainable brand:
How does our rating system work?
Due to our expanded criteria considered and newly devised scoring system, the way we rank brands now works a little differently.
These numbers have changed quite significantly from our previous methodology, and our next blog in the series of the Green Salon Methodology updates will take you through our results, contextualising the choices we’ve made in structuring our rating system this way. Revising the Green Salon methodology has been a lengthy process but with our more detailed methodology, we can empower you, the consumer, to find the brands that really align with your sustainable values and prioritise doing good for the world.
Where do we find the information?
We scour publicly available data on sustainable brands in 4 different areas: planet, people, animals and business. These core themes of Green Salon have remained the same from the very first iteration of our methodology to now.
These are the publicly-available information sources that we look at:
The sustainability pages on their websites
Their impact reports where they have them
Third party verification
Any certifications and accreditations they have
Credible news sources
Alongside this, we track the problematic actions a brand may be taking in a ‘naughty list’; be it misrepresenting their policies or actively damaging the environment, and adjust their scores accordingly.
Our methodology is a dynamic process and will continue evolve over the next decade as sustainable business adapts and evolves to the unfolding environmental situation. We’ll be continuing to update our process along the way, growing and changing with these evolutions as well as the feedback we receive from consumers.
So we’d love to hear from you. How do our criteria reflect your concerns? How do you feel about the ‘naughty list’? Do you believe our scoring should punish a brand if they’re owned by a larger parent company that isn’t sustainable even if their actions individually are?
DISCLAIMER:
It is important to note that we are not a certification body, nor are we auditors, so, like consumers, we rely on companies to tell the truth about their sustainability policies, practices and goals in their publicly available claims.
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