Go deeper
The sources worth trusting, and the neighbours worth knowing
No single score can hold everything. These are the independent certifiers, research organisations and like-minded projects we read ourselves — and the ones we would send you to for the fuller picture.
Certifications
Standards that actually mean something
When you see one of these on a package, somebody independent has checked a claim. None of them is perfect, and several cover only part of a company's products — but each one is a real signal rather than a marketing line.
The library
Every source we link, in one place
Filter by type to find what you want: a certification to look up, a data set to compare, a benchmark of how well a sector is doing, or something to read on a Sunday.
Widening the coverage
How partner ratings combine with ours
One grading method has one set of blind spots. So our five pillars are the anchor, and the partner organisations below are blended in on top — each normalised onto the same 0–100 scale — which is how the headline number gains coverage without our own method being diluted into guesswork.
How the blend works
- Our assessment anchors it. The five weighted pillars keep 60% of the final score, so the method you can read and check never stops being the centre of gravity.
- Verified partner scores share the rest. Each single partner is capped at 20% of the composite, so no one organisation can carry the whole partner budget. A lone partner therefore never takes all 40% — the weight it cannot claim stays with our own method, and the second partner still adds something.
- Every partner is normalised. Good On You's 1–5 scale, CDP's 0–100, B Lab's 0–200, the WBA's A–G letter and LSEG's 0–10 carbon score all map onto a common 0–100, so they can be averaged honestly rather than averaged as raw numbers with different meanings.
- Silence is not a penalty. If no partner covers a company, the composite simply equals our own score. Nobody loses points for a gap in somebody else's coverage.
- Nothing is invented. A partner score only enters the maths once it has been read from that organisation's own published assessment and linked in the company's sources.
Why we will not auto-import partner scores
It is technically possible to pull ratings from other sites automatically. We don't, for three reasons:
- Licensing and terms. Most rating organisations license their scores; scraping them would breach their terms and, in some cases, their copyright.
- Attribution. Their methodology is their work. Presenting it without their name, link and caveats would misrepresent it.
- Method mismatch. Averaging scores that measure different scopes produces a number that looks authoritative and means nothing. Normalising each onto a common scale keeps the comparison honest.
When a partner's data is licensed
One of the organisations above — LSEG (Refinitiv) — publishes its carbon data commercially. That changes nothing about how we treat it: the figure still has to be read from the licensed source itself and linked in the company's sources, we still never guess it, and the company card still names it. It simply means you need your own access to check it, which is why it is shown as the last option on the curator's worksheet rather than the first, and why it only covers large listed companies.
One scale to watch: LSEG scores each ESG category out of
10, not 100. We map it onto our 0–100 scale using the mapping published in
js/data.js, so a published 9 becomes 90/100 here — stated openly
rather than applied invisibly.
The honest state of play
Coverage across partners is uneven. Fashion and footwear are well covered by Good On You; groceries and retail far less so; banking and energy barely at all. That is a property of the sector, not a hole in the arithmetic — and it is exactly why the composite reports how many sources back each score instead of pretending every rating is equally corroborated.
The organisations we blend from
Coverage notes are factual: they describe the sectors each organisation actually rates, and are not a judgement of their quality.
Neighbouring projects
Other people doing versions of this
This project is deliberately a starting point. If you want a fashion specialism, a banking deep dive or a global ethical-shopping database, these are the places to go.
Reading critically
Six questions that cut through any sustainability report
Glossy reports are designed to be convincing. These six questions find the substance in about five minutes, whether you are reading a company's own document or a rating from someone else.
Is the number measured or estimated?
"We estimate" and "we measured" are very different claims. Look for the methodology note, not the headline.
Which year is it, and is it verified?
Old or self-reported data presented in the present tense is the most common trick in the genre.
Does it cover the whole business, or one product line?
"Our sustainable range" tells you nothing about the other ninety per cent.
Are reductions real, or offsetting?
Buying credits is not the same as emitting less. Both can be reported as "carbon neutral".
What does the company's lobbying say?
A company can cut its own emissions while funding the campaigns that block the rules everyone else needs. This is the tell.
Who paid for the assessment?
Third-party verification is far stronger than a badge the company designed for itself.