Pharos Green Labelling System

The Pharos Lens
Drawn from the lighthouse metaphor, the Pharos lens offers a point of reference. It signals and documents the environmental and social performance of products in the marketplace. The Pharos Label will accompany the lens and offer more information than any other green label in the market, including the ability to compare the actual ingredients and attributes of products that bear the label.

Lens Description
The Lens is comprised of a series of wedges that are each assigned a different social or environmental issue. The number of current wedges was determined through a consensus process amongst the Pharos Project team reflecting their vision and expertise. The wedges are not arbitrarily capped at a certain number. This preliminary list of issues is meant to start the discussions on the Pharos Wiki.

The overall intent of the tool will be to organize a vast amount of important environmental and social information into a format that is easily grasped by the consumer. Color is used to set the tool apart with shades of red, yellow, and green graphically showing relative performance on the scale.
Organized around the lens are a series of concentric circles creating the evaluation scale for any particular issue/wedge. The scales are not intended to be the same for each issue – in fact, each will have to reflect the particular set of issues that govern it.

The wedges are grouped into three sectors that serve as organizing elements within the Pharos tool:

• Environment & Resources
• Health & Pollution
• Social & Community

The lens demonstrates the ultimate complexity of material evaluations by highlighting all the issues at once showing that some products may do well in some categories, but poorly in others. It also allows for organizations and individuals to focus in on specific issues in more detail, or to consider a broad range of issues in its selection of materials.

[Pharos Project]