Sustainable Jungle is a leading online publication that promotes sustainable living. Through our content, we educate and inspire people to make environmentally friendly and ethically positive choices.
Our vision is to make conscious living the status quo and integral to the decisions we make: from the way we live our lives to the brands we choose to support.
Behavior change is critical to driving a more sustainable, just, low-carbon future. Consumers are rightly concerned and want to change their behavior but lack the tools and information to make this change effectively.
To address this need, Sustainable Jungle’s simple, consumer-friendly Brand Rating System helps our readers choose better consumer brands across a wide range of product categories.
How It Works - At A Glance
The Sustainable Jungle Brand Rating & Review System functions as a comprehensive framework for assessing the sustainability and ethical practices of consumer brands. The assessment framework is structured into four core elements, each with a set of relevant criteria that form the basis of our assessment.
Nature & Animals
Evaluates a brand’s impact on the natural environment and on animals more broadly. This includes resource use and management, climate action and animal welfare.
Communities & Wellbeing
Evaluates a brand’s impact on their employees, suppliers, customers and the communities in which they operate. This includes treatment of people in the supply chain, health & safety, diversity, equity and inclusion.
Business Values & Governance
Evaluates a brand’s overall mission, value set and transparency. This includes consideration of company size and ownership, responsible marketing and communications, public disclosures and approach to giving.
Product Performance
Evaluates a brand’s ability to meet customers’ functional needs. The premise is that sustainable and ethical products need to meet or exceed conventional standards in terms of performance & durability (where relevant).
The key outcome of the assessment is an ‘Overall Rating’ (see more on this below).
Data Sources
We use the following sources to conduct our assessments:
Public Data Sources
- Brand’s disclosures via their website and sustainability reports
- Third party public disclosures / ratings / indices
- Third party audits
- Certifications
- Public reviews and commentary (forums, reviews on a brand’s website, other public reviews)
Other Sources
- Personal reviews from the Sustainable Jungle team (where requested by the brand)
- Reader input and reviews – we’re always happy to receive direct feedback on lived experience with a brand’s product(s)
- Information provided by the brand on their application form and further direct submissions from brands, predominantly for corrections, however we will encourage brands to make any information disclosed to us available to the general public for transparency
The “Overall Rating” Explained
A rated brand will be awarded one of 5 overall ratings based on a scale of performance relative to peers in the same product category.
The overall rating for a brand is issued based on two key inputs:
- % Score: Calculated based on points issued according to our assessment criteria across the four core elements outlined above. It’s important to note that scoring high or full points is intentionally difficult to achieve which means that the % a brand achieves may appear to be low without understanding the broader context or how they compare to other leading brands in the same product category.
- Benchmarking: All brands will be compared against the brand that has the best rated score in their respective consumer product category. This allows more industry specific ratings given some industries are further along in their sustainability journey than others.
Overall Ratings:
How The Ratings Are Calculated
Our Rating Criteria:
For each criteria, a score on a scale of 0 to 3 points is awarded with 0 being “no action” and 3 being “substantial action or performance”. Scoring 3 points is exceptionally difficult and is awarded only to those brands that are truly leading the charge in a particular area.
If a criteria is not relevant to the brand, the criteria is removed from the consideration set. For example, a 100% vegan brand will not be evaluated on the criteria for animal testing.
The full list and high level descriptions of each criteria is as follows:
Nature & Animals
- Sustainable Materials: Materials are sourced from sustainably managed, renewable or recycled sources.
- Water Use & Management: Considered water use from production (including wastewater). Tracked, measured and ongoing efforts to improve.
- Biodiversity & Deforestation: Limits impact on biodiversity and deforestation from raw materials and inputs. Tracked, measured and ongoing efforts to improve.
- Chemical use & Management: No hazardous chemical use and limits impact of other chemical use. Tracked, measured and ongoing efforts to improve.
- Packaging: Packaging & shipping materials are reduced and made from recycled or renewable sources. Easily recycled or composted at the end of life.
- Waste & pollution: Robust policy or approach to limit or reduce waste created during business operations from production to sale. Tracked, measured and ongoing efforts to improve.
- Circularity & Business Model: Robust policy or approach to product circularity, linear consumptive models and end of life. Limited or no products go to landfill at end of life.
- Climate Change: Carbon reduction targets in place and actions taken to reduce emissions (includes renewable energy).
- Energy Efficiency: Robust policy/approach to reducing energy use during business operations from production to sale (excludes renewable energy). Tracked, measured and ongoing efforts to improve.
- Animal Welfare: If animal derived products or ingredients are used, robust policies and assurances in place to ensure animal welfare (excludes animal testing).
- Animal Testing: No animal testing throughout production.
Communities & Wellbeing
- Workforce: Fair employment terms, safe working conditions and reasonable benefits for employees.
- Human Rights & Modern Slavery In The Supply Chain: Ethical and fair treatment of people throughout the supply chain. No slavery or child labor.
- Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Supports diversity, equity and inclusion in ownership, hiring, people management, product design, branding, marketing and community.
- Health & Safety: Safe products and services. Includes digital rights and privacy considerations.
- Local or small business sourcing/support: Sourcing raw materials and/or production from local, small, underserved or individual makers with the goal of supporting & uplifting small businesses and communities.
Business Values & Governance
- Business Size & Ownership: Transparent ownership by parties with irreproachable ethical standards. Brands who are bigger and better funded have more of a responsibility to drive sustainability outcomes.
- Transparency & Ethics: Provides disclosure to a broad range of stakeholders about ethics, sustainability impacts and performance.
- Responsible Marketing & Communication: Marketing of products and/or services (and any other external communication) is done responsibly without misleading or misrepresenting sustainability attributes (greenwashing) or doing harm.
- Giving: Brand gives time, in-kind contributions or money to charitable causes or community initiatives.
Product Performance
- Performance: High quality products perform as well or better than less sustainable alternatives.
- Designed To Last: Durable/non-consumable products are designed to last and are repairable to extend their useful life.
Methodology
Given we cover a wide range of consumer product categories, our criteria and assessment methodology is designed to be relatively high level and consumer friendly.
Our goal is to provide consumers with access to a standardized resource of key information. Therefore, we aim to replicate the process that a passionate consumer would be able to do themselves (through hours of research) and communicate the results in a standardized, easy to understand format.
To do this, we have a clear set of guidelines for each of our 22 criteria that enables our rating team to award 0, 1, 2 or 3 points for each. The guidelines are predominantly based on differing levels of disclosure and public reviews, but also consider demonstrated performance where available.
- Disclosure means that the brand is openly and transparently communicating their progress. We make our assessment based on the communication of that performance but do not verify the performance itself.
- Demonstrated performance means that the brand can point to a real life outcome of their efforts. This is more difficult to prove or make a judgment on without independent auditing so we will only include this as a consideration when the outcome is clear.
A bonus point can be issued against each criteria for truly groundbreaking demonstrated impact. Once the points are issued, they are used to calculate a % score and then an overall rating (see more on this above).
Our methodology has been developed in consultation with sustainability experts and leading brands. We will continue to review and improve it on an ongoing basis.
Approach
Importantly, we focus on rating brands who are already on their sustainability journey and we require brands to submit an application before they get rated. We do charge brands to be rated. This fee covers the cost of producing a rating which includes the technology we use and our ratings team fee.
For more on this process, head to How To Get Rated
Once a brand is accepted, there is a 5 step process to conducting the rating:
- We use a custom research tool to pull together the data and provide an initial view of the rating
- Our team conducts personal reviews of the brand’s products (where requested)
- Our very human editorial team carefully reviews and adjusts the rating as necessary
- We share our draft rating with the brand to allow for any corrections or further input
- We publish the rating on our ratings directory here: Brand Rating & Review Directory
Ratings then get reviewed and refreshed annually.
What To Expect From Our Rating System
What Our Rating & Review System Is
- Simple: While comprehensive, we use criteria that are easily understood and can be researched directly by your average consumer.
- Largely based on disclosure: Public information, community feedback and direct input from brands.
- Focused on Sustainable Brands: Skewed towards rating sustainable brands to help uplift, improve and shine a light on those already doing more planet positive work.
- Somewhat subjective: Ultimately, the overall assessment is in-part a reflection of our team’s values. We understand that not everyone will share our values. Our team is made up of consumers who care deeply about the planet and people.
What Our Rating & Review System Is Not
- A super detailed multi-layer assessment: With complex, difficult to understand sustainability lingo and concepts.
- Based heavily on performance: While we will reward demonstrated performance in some circumstances, we are not in a position to audit or validate actual performance by a brand.
- A tool designed to highlight bad performers: We will not spend time on brands who are clearly not taking any action.
- Perfectly objective: While our standardized scoring will be transparent and will help us to be as fair as we can, we are humans who care (a lot) and we will have human centered opinions. We also create space for brands and readers to provide their feedback and input.
Need To Know More?
Reach out to us at hello@sustainablejungle.com
