Compare Green Products with Eco-Rate

Eco-Rate

It’s extremely tough to compare green products, especially with so many green marketing claims being made that are hard to verify.  Eco-rate is a service that allows you to examine products based on their comprehensive eco-rating.   The feature that really caught my eye about this site is that  it allows you to compare the cost of a product to it’s environmentally friendliness.

Eco-Ratings

So exactly what is their eco-rating and how can it be used to help you buy products?  When you put in a search or browse for products on their site, each contains 5 separate factors into determining the eco-rating.  Let’s take a look at each:

  • Environmental Impact: The overall environmental rating the product has based on factors of how the product was produced, where it was created and how green is the manufacturer.
  • Consumption: The total energy consumption of the product.
  • Toxicity: If the product contains toxic materials and how dangerous they are on the environment.
  • LifeCycle Cost: The total cost of ownership including energy cost.
  • Price Rating: How the price of this product compares to others in its category.

As you can see, the rating takes into account both environment and cost factors.  It’s pretty obvious to see why I would like this tool.  What’s also neat about this site is that it allows users to input their zip code to get information about local and national rebates for the product.  You can also see local recycling facilities where you can recycle the product or the one you are replacing at the end of it’s life.

Products

Eco-rate has a range of products from lighting to electronics.  On their main page, they have a cool tool where you can explore a simulated home to help you find products that you may need around the home.  They also provide a searching capability to make it easy to find just about any green product you are looking for.   If you are confused about any of the terminology their site uses for products, they have a dictionary of green terms.

Eco-rate is definitely worth checking out, especially when trying to determine which products have the best combination of price and eco-friendliness.  I also recommend a visual green search engine I talked about sometime ago called JumpGuage as well as various other great Green Search Engines.

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Comments

  1. Wow sounds like a great website. A website like this makes it tougher for companies to hide behind so-called green labels. Now we can get the straight facts of which products actually are green.

  2. great website! i used it a couple of times already.

  3. It’s really good thing before purchase green product first we can check out about eco rate of that products and we can easily examine which one is good product.

    • BareBeliever
    • November 9th, 2009

    This is such a fabulous website! I care most about toxicity and energy consumption of the product, but i never knew where I could find this information in bulk like this.

    Thanks to whomever submitted it!

  4. Thats definitely a pretty wicked website. I know its something I’ll be using when considering certain new purchases in the future

  5. It’s really very good concept of compare green product with eco rating. So, anyone check eco rate before purchase green product.

  6. This looks like a really useful resource, and I agree with the commenter above who said this makes it harder for companies to hide behind green labels. I will definitely be checking this out.

  7. Hopefully websites like this go a long way in making companies realize that they actually have to be environmental friendly, instead of just pretending to be.

  8. Website like these are a good start. I hope the world as a whole gets better about eco friendly products and working environments.

  9. I think there needs to be more awareness about this, people are confused about what the standards are.

  10. We have to start thinking about products which have green license. Our environment needs our attention. Besides, we can live better if our environment is under good condition.

  1. November 5th, 2009
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