Hey all,
I started a side project to deal with greenwashing, and wanted a gut check from people who know how messy the information available online gets.
Most ethical ratings feel pretty subjective to me - "Not Good Enough" vs "Great" type verdicts. I wanted something more rules-based so I built a Python scoring engine that scores brands using evidence publicly available (certification registries etc.). Nothing scores unless it links to actual proof, so a marketing statement on its own is worth zero.
The core idea is matching specific issues to specific certifications. For each problem (I.e. living wages, microplastics, chemical use whatever) there's a set of certs that actually address it. So the engine asks two things per issue: does the brand hold a cert that's genuinely relevant to the problem, and is that cert any good?
The certs themselves get graded first based on how much they are worth - who verifies it, is third-party enforcement real, etc. - so a self-declared commitment doesn’t count the same as an independent audit of all factories.
The main limit to this method in my opinion is that certs cost money. So an independent brand doing everything right but without a certification scores 0.
I just went live with the first batch of brand evaluations for fashion. Does this issue-to-cert matching make sense yo you, or am I missing something obvious?
. Cheers.
Submitted June 15, 2026 at 08:22AM by Accomplished-Owl6352 https://ift.tt/kLCPuAM
