What Information is Available?

GoodGuide brings together the best information available on the health, environmental, and social performance of the products we use every day and the companies who make these products. To date, GoodGuide has pulled together research from over 50 data partners. Much of this information has not been accessible to the general public before.

The vision is for GoodGuide to be able to provide the best information available on the health, environmental, and social performance surrounding every product and company in the world. We're just getting started on our mission to reach that goal. So stay tuned as new information about different products and industries is available soon.

How to Search

Searching for products and companies is easy. Simply enter the name of the product or company into the search box, hit 'search' and a list of search results will be returned, sorted by highest and lowest ratings. You can sort these results by selecting three filters located at the top of each results page. You may also choose to search by phrases. For example, 'Best' or 'Worst' products or companies will result in a list of top or bottom rated products or companies.

You may modify your search at any time, by returning to the homepage to perform a new search or using the Modify Search option on the left navigation of the search results page.

Browsing by Category

An alternative way to explore the site is to browse products or companies by category. From the homepage, when you browse by category (i.e Facial Cleanser), GoodGuide will produce a list of all products or companies in that category listed according to their overall ratings.

Feedback

If you have questions that aren't answered here or suggestions for improvement, we'd love to hear from you! Just click the Ideas link at the top of any page.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How Should I Interpret GoodGuide's Ratings?

GoodGuide rates products and companies on a scale of 0 to 10. A score of 10 means the product or company performs excellently. A score of 0 means the products performs very poorly. We present both numerical scores and color codings of performance. A dark green rating is excellent and a dark red rating is very poor. Individual products and companies are rated relative to the performance of similar products and companies.

The GoodGuide rating is based on an aggregation and analysis of a complex range of types of information on chemical ingredients, products, brands, factories, companies, industrial sectors, and even countries. Our rating algorithm converts absolute measures (such as tons of chemical emissions), relative measures (such as rankings of related companies), and binary measures (such as whether a product is or is not certified) into a single, unified score.

Ratings are currently calculated based on GoodGuide’s performance assessment algorithm. We are currently flowing 125 of our top criteria in the GoodGuide Beta website. If you want to narrow in on a specific issue of concern, you can also choose to view only environmental indicators, only social indicators, or only health indicators. The base criteria in our system are weighted in our algorithm. In the future, you will be able to adjust the weights you want to assign to different issues.

Can GoodGuide Tell Me if a Product Will Cause Cancer or Make Me Sick?

No. GoodGuide cannot tell you what your risk of experiencing a specific health impact might be. Instead, it indicates what is known scientifically about the chemical components of a product and how it was produced. GoodGuide cannot assess your exposure to a hazard, or whether you will develop a particular health outcome. Furthermore, health effects are often inherently uncertain. There can be effects that only appear many years later, and for which the mechanism causing a disease may be unclear.

The purpose of making GoodGuide available is not to prove or disprove whether a product is toxic. Instead, it is an information system for the benefit of the community, which may include alerting consumers to the possibility that products may not meet their personal standards or values. In developing GoodGuide, our team distinguishes carefully between different data sources based on the degree of known hazards and the authoritativeness of the source. GoodGuide's scores do not incorporate conclusions from data that cannot be fairly made at this time.

While GoodGuide strives for accuracy and completeness, the GoodGuide site, and all data on it, is intended solely for informational use. Do not use this site for medical purposes, and consult your physician if you have any condition or allergy or other medical issue relating to products and their ingredients.

Why Should I Trust GoodGuide?

The data, criteria, and ratings that power GoodGuide's scores are evaluated with the support of independent experts who advise government agencies, NGOs, and industry leading companies on environmental, social, and health issues associated with products and production processes. These experts have helped create leading databases on life cycle assessment, health hazard assessment, and worker treatment, and have helped draft recent certification standards across a range of industries. In addition, the founding team members have led research relating to the environmental, social, and health impacts of products at UC Berkeley and MIT. Their research has worked to advance new methods for monitoring and measuring the impacts of global supply chains.

To ensure that GoodGuide takes only the best data available into consideration for its ratings, a dedicated content team carefully assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the data sources, particularly from scientific and verification viewpoints. Evaluation of data sources include whether they are:

• Based on trustworthy government, NGO, or academic sources;
• Reliant on multiple data sources in their own right;
• Produced according to clear and well-defined standards and procedures;
• Verified or checked for their quality by independent authorities; and,
• Honest and open in acknowledging their uncertainties and data gaps.

Our approach is unique: combining multiple databases and data sources to help reduce the likelihood of mistaken source assumptions. Moreover, GoodGuide's rating algorithms are based on aggregating, weighting, and rating these data sources.

Does GoodGuide Recommend or Endorse any Brands or Products?

No. GoodGuide does not endorse, promote, certify, or sell, any particular brand or product. GoodGuide is an information system designed to help consumers choose between products in a more informed way. The data analysis and ratings are blind to product and brand claims. GoodGuide's product evaluations are products based on a scoring algorithm that combines health, social, and environmental concerns.

So Why Does GoodGuide Give Away this Information?

Frankly, GoodGuide is the product of a group of scientists and engineers who love data, and who really want to know ourselves about the impacts of the products we consume. We happen to enjoy researching products and the global supply chains behind them and thought it would be cool to make the best scientific information in the world available for free, for non-scientists to screen through their personal preferences, in hopes that it could potentially improve peoples' lives, and maybe even make the world a slightly better place. So enjoy!