The “green” incarnation of travel, called ecotourism, mandates that travelers minimize their cultural, economic, and environmental impacts as much as possible to promote sustainability. But while there are thousands of hotels worldwide that promote themselves as “green”, many of them are only partially fulfilling these requirements – they might not be wasting energy, but are paying locals at near-slave wages, or funneling money out of the local economy.

Whole Travel, a new site that launches tonight, is looking to keep these hotels honest while promoting the concept of sustainable travel. The site assigns each hotel with a score based on its environmental, cultural, and economic impacts, as well as its “customer interaction”, or how well it teaches visitors about the issues that affect their destination.

To receive a score, hotels first self-assign a rating based on how well they think they fare in each category. Whole Travel CEO Matthew Davie acknowledges that these scores will be biased, but believes that submitting a misleading score would actually hurt hotels in the long run, as readers of the site would be able to tag them as dishonest and discourage prospective customers. However, the site isn’t relying on good faith alone – it is also working with local non-profits around the world to verify rating for hotels in their regions. The site is also working with international non-profits like Sustainable Travel International, which has similar goals but is based on a “badge” system that hotels need to pay for to become accredited as Green.

The concept is nice; the execution is “classic”: full-text search, guided navigation to refine by amenities (air conditioning, golf course…) and activities (bird watching, trekking…), hotel pages where the ranking is explained.

I searched an hotel in Costa Rica, refined by golf course; the only result was the Papagayo Hiton hotel, self-rated 4 out of 5 (marked as “pending review”). But how could an hotel be green with a golf course (even in Costa Rica) ? Isn’t this hotel part of the Papagayo complex which has been a disaster in terms of ecology / sustainability (as reporting by the Lonely Planet – see this article)? This is anecdotic, but highlights the difficulty for such sites as WholeTravel to provide credible ratings. I’m curious to see how the ranking of this hotel will evolve when being reviewed by WholeTravel.

Anyway, even with a credibility to be worked on, it’s important to see start-ups investigating how to empower customers for their purchase decisions. For me, WholeTravel shares a similar concept with GoodGuide that provides health, environmental and social facts about products; or Zeer that gives nutrition facts for all food goods. I would love to see such databases of facts on products to enrich a “classic” shopping search / price comparison experience in the near future!

• Green labels or certifications (I.e: Energy Star for electronics goods)
• Green attributes (I.e: organically grown goods…)
• Green categories (I.e: rechargeable batteries)
• Green companies or brands

From some of those criterias, a score is compute to rank the “greenness” of products:

The Greenzer Score is an algorithm that leverages ratings and certifications from third party groups that we believe to be the most thorough and relevant sources of information in their respective fields. Products listed on Greenzer have met our minimum green filtering criteria so low scoring products are still green products. Click on the little green information button on any Greenzcore icon to find out more about how it works. [...] The Greenzer Score aggregates leading data sources of environmental performanc, information, and statistics on a variety of products and brands. Each score takes into account ratings and certifications related to both the product itself as well as the brand of the product. We aggregate the ratings and certifications from these third parties to create a 1-10 score for products in a given category.

The Greenzer Score is clearly the innovation brought by Greenzer, compared to other green CSEs (i.e: like TheFindGreen). It gives an easy way to appreciate the environmental quality of a product, with an “objective” and well explained rating.

However, it’s not clear for me how merchants are chosen. If Greenzer is a paid CSE for merchants, it may be difficult for Greenzer to rank products in such a way the greenest products are highlighted and merchants are happy with the service.

The new site is partnering with Channel Intelligence Inc., which is contributing its data classification know-how to filter a wide selection of environmentally preferable consumer products available on Greenzer.com’s shopping engine.The company says the collaboration will help consumers find green products and understand what makes those products green. Greenzer will use optimized product and commerce data provided by CI’s SellCore Publisher Solutions for advanced capabilities in identification and integration of significant green product attributes. Founded as a shopping engine focused solely on green products, Greenzer presents product and retailer information so that consumers can shop knowing that products listed are environmentally friendly. Working behind the scenes, CI provides the technology to identify the eco-labeled products based on attributes such as “Energy Star” qualification, industry-approved certification marks by the Green Electronic Council through EPEAT (the Electronics Products Environmental Assessment Tool) and other green product attributes, according to the company.

Greenzer follows the path of TheFindGreen or PriceGrabber; but clearly there is room for more players in this emerging market. I’m waiting for the launch; in the meantime, the blog is quite interesting with focus on a specific green product in each post.

The website, which is located at http://www.TheFindGreen.com, is solely inclusive of products that are organic, developed using ecologically conscious processes, or those offered by retailers who are actively committed to preserving the environment.

I find TheFindGreen is quite an appealing product. ShopGreen by PriceGrabber was a quite good initiative but the breadth of products was not that big. Clearly, the approach TheFind has adopted from the beginning – crawling the web to extract all products – is really successful on this niche market.

Still, I wonder how they can consider products as green in an accurate way with those crawling technologies: is it enough to detect keywords as “green”, “organic”, “sustainable”, “recycled” to classify products as green products? I suppose it should be easier for PriceGrabber to classify those products based on feeds from paid merchants.

Reliability vs breadth? In this case, breadth seems better for the end user.

(via Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies)

• “Energy Star-compliant products”
• “Products made from organic or recycled materials”
• “Products made from environmentally-friendly materials including hemp, bamboo, soy, and seagrass”
• “Biodegradable products and compost bins”
• “Products with low usage of natural resources including LED light bulbs, low flow shower heads/toilets, solar power, and cloth diapers”
• “Products made by noted environmentally-conscious companies like Patagonia”

I really like the approach PriceGrabber has followed: creating a site that is independent from their main site allows them to efficiently communicate through the new “ShopGreen” brand and a new webdesign. Still, the content displayed on ShopGreen is also available on their main site: the “ShopGreen” site is only a specific view of the classic PriceGrabber site, with “ecoFriendly” filters always on (see screenshot below).

Still I wonder how they fill those “ecoFriendly” filters. I didn’t see any mention of “green” attributes to be filled by merchants in PriceGrabber Data Feed Requirements. I understand some data could come from their product database providers (data regarding “Energy Star-compliant products” for instance). But for soft categories, they may have to rely on data from merchants, either from specific fields or through attribute extraction. Also, they should do quite a lot of manual tweaking and editorial work (to identify “Products made by noted environmentally-conscious companies like Patagonia” for instance)…

Well done, PriceGrabber!

(via ComparisonEngines)

RealCosts is “is a Firefox plug-in that inserts emissions data into travel related e-commerce websites. The first version adds CO2 emissions information to airfare websites such as Orbitz.com, United.com, Delta.com, etc. Following versions will work with car directions, car rental, and shipping websites. Think of it like the nutritional information labeling on the back of food… except for emissions“.

This kind of service was already available on some e-commerce websites (for instance on Voyages-Sncf.com french website). But what I like in Real Costs:

• The service is provided to the end user by a 3rd party company, not by the merchant itself – easier to trust the results. Furthermore, a Wiki is available to see which formulas have been implemented.
• The name of the service suggests the real cost of a trip is not only the price you pay : indirect costs on our environment must be taken into account. I really like this approach when we try to educate people.
• By using GreaseMonkey technology, the comparison charts are directly embedded into merchant webpages.

I really feel this kind of service should be integrated in shopping engines – to expose those environmental considerations to a bigger audience.

(via Standblog)

Yahoo! has built a powerful tool in www.18seconds.org, which tracks data for CFL purchases nationally and locally. You will be able to see the amount of CFLs sold across the country, by city or state — along with the equivalent dollars, energy and greenhouse gas emissions saved. [...] I believe the CFL is the Trojan horse into the minds of the American public — once you get somebody feeling good about making a difference while also saving money, you have them thinking about what else they can do. Every CFL represents an opportunity for ordinary people to take a stand.

This is a pretty good site, very Yahoo! in its look&feel and usability. A gadget to be embedded in your website is available, but is not enough configurable: 160px * 500px as only size is far too big to fit properly in many websites.

Don’t miss the “What are the CFL bulbs & why switch?” link at the top right: you will get a lot of useful information regarding CFL technology, including the fact CFL bulbs contain mercury and must not be thrown in common garbage. This fact is buried in the website, and should have been more visible. We wouldn’t want to reduce CO2 emissions, and at the same time pollute soils with mercury!

I would have appreciated to find a global analysis of the benefits of CFL bulbs vs classic bulbs, from manufacturing to recycling. Indeed, I find critical to have the global ecological footprint from end to end, before pushing everyone to adopt CFL bulbs.

La croissance est un dogme irréaliste et dangereux qui suppose que l’on puisse s’enrichir et accumuler indéfiniment sur une planète aux ressources limitées. C’est pourquoi, plus qu’au “développement durable”, fondé sur la pérennité du progrès, je crois à la “décroissance soutenable” : comment vivre avec moins plutôt qu’avec plus mobiliserait une tout autre créativité.

Non, il ne s’agit pas de mettre en cause les acquis de la modernité, mais de faire en sorte qu’ils soient mis au service d’un projet humain. Autrement dit, recréer des entreprises à taille humaine, reconsidérer l’organisation du territoire, la manière dont le travail doit être réparti pour réduire le nombre d’inactifs… Notre économie, qui prétend à l’amélioration de la condition humaine, s’est retournée contre nous. L’humain est devenu contingent là-dedans.

Enfin, pour terminer ce post, un article en ligne écrit par cet homme définitivement intéressant : Pour une sobriété heureuse