Brand’s articles vs Industry standard
The “industry standard” is a hypothetical, conventional version of your own product that we create for a direct and fair comparison.
This allows us to measure the environmental benefits of your sustainable choices. Crucially, the comparison is always against a product of the same type, same weight, and same functionality as yours.
How we build the conventional alternative
To create this benchmark, we take your product’s data and swap out its unique, sustainable features for their most common, conventional alternatives in the market.
- Materials: Your sustainable materials (like organic cotton or recycled polyester) are replaced with their conventional counterparts (conventional cotton or virgin polyester) that have similar properties and density.
- Dyes & finishes: Your specialized dyeing or finishing processes are swapped for standard industrial methods that achieve the same function, look, and feel.
- Manufacturing locations & transport: We standardize the supply chain geography. We assume each production step (e.g., spinning, weaving, manufacturing) occurs in the main global exporting country for that specific process. The transport between these locations is then standardized to:
- Truck for journeys within the same continent.
- Ship for journeys between continents.
- The final delivery exception: There is one critical exception that reflects common industry practice. For finished articles, the final journey from the factory (Tier 1) to the warehouse is assumed to be by plane for intercontinental routes. This accounts for the widespread use of air freight to shorten delivery times and compensate for supply chain delays.
- Packaging: Your product’s shipping packaging is replaced with a conventional combination of corrugated cardboard boxes and plastic films. Retail packaging depends on the product category and size of the product.
The result: calculating your savings
By calculating the full environmental impact of this standardized “conventional” product and comparing it to your product’s impact, we can precisely measure your environmental savings (if your product performs better) or environmental debts (if it performs worse). This gives you a clear, data-driven picture of how your sustainable choices truly stack up against the industry norm.