Whether buying the ingredients for a meal, planning a meeting or designing a product, the choices we make every day have vast social and environmental impacts. Until now, advertisements have provided most of the information about which products are green or ethical. A superficial approach, which fails to account for the life-cycle of products, endangers sustainability by betraying the trust of consumers and downplaying the efforts of industry. “Sourcemap.org” is a tool for understanding the story behind products in order to support sustainable decisions. Many third-party services rate products, but “Sourcemap” is the first resource that makes environmental assessment tools available to the general public.
A web calculator allows anyone to measure the carbon footprint of products during manufacturing, shipping, use and end-of-life. A novel mapping interface displays the trajectories taken by each element of a product and helps to determine which products are better suited to certain locations. Modern supply chains are too complex to be monitored by any single entity, but a crowd-sourced approach allows us to piece together a collective understanding of resource flows.
“Sourcemap” is socially functional so that the contributions of each user – whether a consumer, a designer or a producer – can be shared on a variety of digital and physical media. Producers can use supply chains published on “Sourcemap” to market transparent and sustainable business practices. The maps can be shared on any site (such as a Youtube movie), printed onto advertisements or packaging or linked through two-dimensional barcodes (such as QR codes) that consumers can look up using a mobile phone in a retail store. With every entry on “Sourcemap” the collective database grows, providing more choices to users seeking to make sustainable decisions. A “Carbon Catalogue” containing footprints of hundreds of materials and processes is continually being improved and expanded by user contributions and by a team of life-cycle assessment specialists. A database of producers, including the geographic locations of mines, farms and manufacturing plants, is growing with every supply chain contributed. By working closely with small businesses, government agencies, NGOs and large industries, the “Sourcemap” team is adding sustainable practices to the site and building additional calculators and visualization of various social and environmental metrics for sustainability.

Links: http://www.sourcemap.org/

Originated at the MIT Media Lab, “Sourcemap” is made possible by a world-wide community of volunteers dedicated to transparency and sustainability. The site was released publicly on September 1, 2009. In the first six months, the site registered over 1,200 users, who generated over 700 maps. Today “Sourcemap” is being expanded in partnership with design schools, regional governments and medium-sized and large businesses, in an effort to build a geographically distributed resource for finding socially and environmentally sustainable products and for disseminating industrial best practice.