Green Wombat

Go to eco-living sites like TreeHugger and Green Options – Green Wombat faves – and you’ll find a plethora of posts about green products. Trawl user-review sites like Yelp and you can tap the collective consciousness about your neighborhood restaurants or the local hair salon. Now San Francisco startup SustainLane has re-purposed the Web 2.0 features of a Yelp to create a user-generated review site and directory for green products and services to tap the growing interest in sustainable living. "We really saw some traction on Yelp, with people sharing experiences about dining and local businesses, and we said we want to create a space for people to share experiences about green products and businesses," SustainLane senior marketing director Haru Komuro told Green Wombat. The company seeded the site with reviews collected at a Washington, D.C., eco- festival in October and launched the service last week. SustainLane.com currently has about 3,000 reviews on everything from organic insect repellent to earth-friendly diapers. The site also sports some 10,000 green business listings from a directory the company previously compiled. Of course, evaluating the environmental attributes of a new household cleanser is a bit trickier than a rating a cappuccino at the corner cafe. Komuro says SustainLane will guard against greenwashing by companies making unsupportable claims. "People might submit McDonald’s organic salad and its up to users to decide," she says. "We hope to build ratings and communications tools and moderation tools so any greenwashing will become obvious."

SustainLane was founded in 2004 by James Elsen, a Netscape veteran, and funded by angel investors. The company initially focused on developing a database of government sustainability policies and practices but has more recently morphed into a media company, producing a cartoon series called The Unsustainables. "We decided with all the trends going on in the Web 2.0 space it really made sense to give people a voice so they could contribute," Komuro says. "We struggled with what this information should be – should it be about sustainable cities or what – and then we had an epiphany that since around the office we’re always talking about what green products to use it should be about that."  SustainLane plans to make money off the site through advertising and sponsorships and by connecting consumers to eco-friendly businesses. Komuro says the company has also been approached by green businesses that want to upload their inventories to the site. "Management believes this is the direction to go," she says. "It’s scalable and we’ve heard for years that this is what the community wants."

The site’s success, of course, will depend on attracting enough citizen-reviewers to create a critical – and credible – mass of information to make SustainLane useful to would-be green product purchasers. Komuro says the company plans to get the word out through grass roots marketing and via the ever-growing green blogosphere.