Q&A - Jacob Malthouse, co-founder of ecolabelling.org

These guys are looking at branding and trying to find out whether the proof is in the pudding…

We asked Jacob Malthouse, co-founder of ecolabelling.org,what was what.

What does your company do?

Right now we’re looking at who’s deciding what’s green. The next step is to separate the green from the greenwash.

How does this help the green business movement?

To us there is no green business ‘movement’. There is only business.

Good business is about understanding your responsibilities and building trust. Bad business is about making misleading or simplistic claims to consumers.

Give us an example of how this works

Ecolabels are the tools that businesses are using to try and communicate responsibility and trust to the market. You can visit ecolabelling.org and choose the ecolabels associated with the products you need in order to build your own purchasing strategy.

Two examples:

You are buying some coffee. You see a label on the coffee but aren’t sure what it means. You investigate at ecolabelling.org and decide it’s a reputable label. You continue to buy that coffee and look for the label elsewhere.

You are an IT manager in charge of buying equipment for a large software company. You visit ecolabelling.org to find labels for the electronics and energy industries. You choose the labels that meet your goals and include them (or their criteria) in your purchasing policy.

Trying to find this information by yourself is a nightmare – trust us – this should be a lot easier than it is, and we’re here to help.

What are you planning to do?

This site is the first step. We needed a global picture before we could understand how to meet our goal of separating the green from the greenwash. We plan to go from “it’s good because it has an ecolabel” to “it’s good because it has a good ecolabel”.

Anything else?

The greenwash smackdown is coming.

Ooooooh.