It all started last July when Walmart announced it would begin surveying its suppliers on their environmental performance in order to one day rate the sustainability of its products. Since that landmark announcement, academics from the Arizona State University and University of Arkansas launched the Sustainability Consortium, a group representing government, NGO, academics and business interests that would develop the standards to be used to rate the sustainable attributes of products. Today, the consortium is made up of 26 Tier-I members and 6 Tier-II members (for clarity on the distinctions between Tier-I and Tier-II memberships and their costs, refer to the consortium’s application form).
Although the consortium was spawned off the Walmart Supplier Sustainability Assessment Tool, the Sustainability Consortium isn’t directly relevant or related to that tool. Rather, the intention of the Consortium is to create a system that would enable companies to get information on product categories or products (not at the company level). The Consortium will work to build the scientific platform, methodologies and tools that can help companies to assess the environmental impacts of consumer products over their lifecycle.
“After looking a lot of different approaches to creating a scientific foundation, we have come to the conclusion that if you don’t account for actual impacts for the use of consumer goods over their entire lifecycles, you’re likely to make bad decisions,” according to Johnson, who hails from the Sam Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.
The Sustainability Consortium plans to make its data available in an open source framework called Earthster (currently in its beta-testing version).
To get the ball rolling, the Consortium has launched sectoral projects in order to begin developing infrastructure, tools and prototype metrics. An electronics sector pilot just launched last week, when Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Toshiba, Intel, Best Buy, and Walmart said they will work with the Sustainability Consortium on a system for rating electronics based on environmental and social aspects. Another pilot that is coming up soon is an apparel project; as well as food-agriculture and home-personal care sector pilots are underway. 
The initial work for the electronics sector pilot have been on assessing desktops, laptops, and monitors. The results is planned to be released in the third quarter of 2010. The goal is to create criteria for all sorts of consumer electronics.
Representatives from both Dell and HP (whom are well recognized as sustainability pace-setters in the IT industry) have said that the research was meant to make it easier for consumers to choose products based on environmental criteria. However, it is still not quite clear yet on how the Sustainability Consortium will collaborate with existing electronics certification programs.
How will the outcome from the work of this Consortium fall into the place of a world with already existing programs such as the EnergyStar and the EPEAT environmental rating system? Will all these sustainability index cause more confusion (than help) with consumers? We shall see soon.
Tags: Environmental, Sustainability