Methodology

Practically Green has a proprietary methodology that helps turn the complexities of lifecycle impact assessments, greenhouse gas emissions data, materials safety data sheets, and scientific health or research studies into a simple, easy impact number that real people can understand: POINTS.

The underlying expectation is that you will be doing yourself, your family, and the planet good if you minimize your water use, non-renewable energy use, toxin exposure, and resource consumption/waste. The points, then, are based on actions that relate to any of those four categories and in many cases, are related to your personal behaviors as opposed to your households. For example, we ask you about the car you drive, not how many cars belong to your household.

When Practically Green assigns points to an action, the first step is to determine which category the action is mostly related to. There are times an action benefits several categories, but we try to focus on the most important area.

The second step is to determine the positive impact of the action in that category, relative to a conventional choice. We use third party academic, government and non-government resources to try and find a consensus opinion on the impact. If there are conflicts, we determine whether there is at least enough data to warrant caution and assign points accordingly.

We then compare the positive impact of that action, relative to the conventional choice to a proprietary scale that we have developed to assign points.

If an action has a high number of points (the highest score for an action is 150 points), it means:

• It’s relatively easy to measure, scientific consensus is clear, and the impact is high relative to conventional choices.

If an action has a low number of points, it can mean:

• It’s educational or influential, but hard to directly measure an impact (5 points)
• It has a real impact, but it’s very small OR the impact data is all over the board OR it’s controversial as to how bad/good the choice is, but there’s enough consensus to warrant paying attention (10 points)

How do you determine my overall profile?

To determine profiles, we look at the different possible combinations of points and actions by category and across categories in order to estimate total improvements relative to conventional choices. We then slot people into one of 10 segments.

We are also not suggesting Superbly Green is perfectly green. We do believe that if you make it to Superbly Green, you have accumulated the benefits of numerous, significant actions and if someone came and audited your life--you would likely have (though by no means be guaranteed to have) reduced your water use, energy use, toxin exposure, and resource consumption/waste by ~50% versus your baseline. You would also still have lots of improvements to go!

Current limitations

Our methodology is based in science, but it’s also a lot of art and a work in progress. Here are things we do not currently do that as we evolve, we will continue to evaluate.

• We don’t ask about second homes or recreational vehicles. We’ve also left your “work life” out of it, for now so business travel and office behaviors are not accounted for because these are often decisions that are not directly in your control.
• Our points max out. Once an action makes it to the “high impact” box, it gets the same points as any other high impact action even if one action is even better than the other. Similar, if you live in a home that is larger than 4,000 square feet, you are getting the max penalty whether it’s 100 feet over or a thousand feet over.
• We don’t do negative points for actions. So, for example, you can earn stuff points for using cloth diapers, but you don’t get dinged for using water to wash them.
• We don’t collect actual usage data. If you want something that is going help with energy or water monitoring or carbon emissions calculations, we will happily refer you to amazing tools that exist elsewhere on the web.

Feedback

We're constantly tuning our methodology. Please let us know what you think.