In 1998 I started Greenhome.com. Demand for green products was hitting the mainstream, but people still had no easy way to find them, and suppliers had no common venue to merchandise them. It seemed a good idea to take all the consumer products that were truly green and put them under one roof.

Imagine walking into Wal-Mart or Sears, only every product on every shelf was selected for its environmentally friendly qualities. That was and is the goal of Greenhome.com: to be the first environmental superstore.

Green Home exists to Green America, one home at a time. And in the process to help create and cultivate a market for green products. Our logic is that American-style consumerism is the primary force destroying the planet. So consumerism itself needs to become the primary force that could save it. If people are given the chance to vote with their dollars, and it is made easy enough for them to do so, they will. This was the belief that launched our company: That no single thing could have a bigger impact on our ecological footprint than for Americans to stop buying as many of the toxic and wasteful products as they do.

We began scouring the country for environmentally friendly products. From this inception, the unifying theme was that there is an environmentally superior alternative to all the products we use on a daily basis and - Hey America! - here they are!

We soon realized that the Product Approval Policy that we would use to determine whether to include a product or not was at least as important as the products themselves. It was the concept of green we were selling.

In order to earn the consumer's trust, we developed an independent Product Approval Board, made up of experts and industry veterans, that could advise and dissent, and could review the products we might carry and make a determination about which ones they considered green.

I hired Marc Mowrey, an old colleague of mine who works in the Waste Management division at US EPA, to be the Director of the department, and Linda Mason Hunter, who had written The Healthy Home, the first book on detoxifying your home, to be the Editor in Chief. Also brought aboard were John Greenberg, who founded the largest green wholesale company in the country, GreenCo, and Christi Graham, founder of the Green Resource Center.

We have also since invited and received acceptances from Mary Cordaro, founder of H3 Environmental, one of the county's leading green home inspection outfits, and noted author and green products expert Annie Berthold-Bond.

To get things off the ground, we decided our best bet was to partner with Scientific Certification Systems, the largest independent environmental testing lab in the country. While Stan Rhodes, its founder, felt he could not join the board due to a conflict of interest, he advised us as we developed our policy, and became a strong advocate. His main contribution might be summarized as "green is as green does" - that application and context are as important as any specific criterion. A window can be green depending on where you put it. Paint with fungicide might even be green if it's used in a high humidity area, if you would otherwise need to keep repainting every six months. What we learned was: Don't be so rigid with your rules that you lose sight of the function and goals at hand.

Our next move was to gather all the leaders we could of the green products movement into one room for an extended Green Products Seminar. We invited our Product Approval Board, as well as SCS Vice President and Co-Founder Linda Brown, and Susie Shannon, Vice President from Eco Expo (the predecessor to the current Green Festival) to attend as well. For three solid days in early 2000 we drilled down deep in a number of subcategories to arrive at a model for how we would rate our products.

The real highlight was seeing again how the concepts of application and context revealed why the field of green seals and logos remains so unapplied to most of the green products out there - and how great a challenge changing this was and remains to be. While there are three areas that have begun to take off - organic food, green building and socially responsible investing - there are precious few resources the consumer can turn to for all the scores of other areas for which there are products and services.

Indeed, the field of rating eco-products, to quote a recent Wall Street Journal article, is "a swampy mess of competing acronyms and conflicting claims." In fact, as we have learned, a number of eco-labels are actually industry fronts to fool the consumer. The most notable example is the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), a screen for sustainable lumber that competes with the more legitimate Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)'s mark, but is actually made up of a consortium of the most powerful timber companies. How in the world would the consumer be expected to know the difference?

In the end, consumer trust can only be built by establishing a sustained record of integrity. If we are correct, and over time we can help grow the market for eco-products by growing the Green Home brand, eventually our Green Home trademark may well become a trusted source for greenness. But that success will depend on the quality of the products we sell, and our ability to intelligently apply the range of existing criteria into a credible screen that actually works. So how exactly do we rate the products that we carry?

In a nutshell, we divide the green products universe into three major categories: 1) Toxicity In Use (TIU), 2) Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), 3) Corporate Citizenship. These three categories cut across all 160 subcategories of products that we carry, from lawn furniture to light bulbs.

Each subcategory of product type has specific environmental issues and impact points that fall into one of these three major assessment categories.

We think the true definition of green requires taking all three sets of criteria into consideration.

The middle one, LCA, is sort of the "holy grail" of the environmental
movement. When a product rates highly regarding its entire life cycle, then it truly can be classified as close to zero impact, smallest footprint, or green. LCA involves everything from how the product is made ("upstream") to how it might affect a person while it's fulfilling its intended use (TIU), to what happens when that use has reached it's end and it is disposed of in some way ("downstream"). If the environmental impacts from cradle to grave (or cradle to cradle in an ideal world) are nil or close to nil, that's as green as it gets.

So, if LCA is the most important measure, why is it number two, and why is Toxicity In Use, or TIU, number one? Because TIU is that portion of the life cycle that impacts the consumer most directly. It's as if LCA is the entire light spectrum, but TIU is the visible light spectrum. It's true that if
every product adhered to the standards of a better LCA, the world would be greenest. But if every product simply had a better rating on TIU, the world would be greener. And the odds that people will modify their behavior based on LCA are far lower than on TIU. We're a consumer company, so we start where the consumer starts.

The third arena with which we concern ourselves is the company that makes the products. How good a "citizen" are they? How do they treat their workers, animals, and the world around them? Do they pollute? It might be a very effective water filter, but if the company that makes it is dumping dioxin into the river, that kind of undoes the good they're doing. Do they make other horrible products along with their green ones? There are some companies that are just so bad, I don't think they could make a green enough product that we would carry it.

We've developed a 3-color system that gives ratings in all three areas, creating a grid of 9 possible color-coded points that any product can get. Ranking and presenting all the green products in our database with these designations is a massive project, but we are committed to seeing it through. In the meanwhile, we have received good response for simply carrying the products that have passed the green muster, and not carrying those that have failed to make the cut. And we continue to publish in venues such as GreenMoney Journal our plans for taking things to the next level, namely, a detailed and usable set of green ratings that we believe will be so useful to consumers and make such a difference in growing the green market.