What's The GoLite Index?
The GoLite Index™ is a tool and report card we created to help us drive our products to the most sustainable versions we can make. It is a product-level measurement tool and scorecard that addresses each product’s key social and environmental impacts, helping us make better decisions that drive our products to the most sustainable versions we can produce. And we hope it will help you make better purchasing decisions too. We see it as a starting point and our honest effort at product-level transparency.
We work hard to minimize environmental impacts throughout our company’s operations, but we can make the biggest positive difference for you, our company and the planet by taking a close look at the products we make. The materials we choose, the production methods we employ, the factories we select, and the degree to which we take responsibility for a product’s entire life-cycle, are all key avenues for responsible change.
Every product is scored along three dimensions on a 0 to 5 scale – rounded to the nearest half point. It is based on best practices from within our industry and the sustainability and fair labor realms. While The GoLite Index does a lot, it's not a marketing campaign, so not all of the product scores are perfect. But, when they are aren’t perfect, you can be sure that we are working hard to improve them. Lower scores can help us create a road map for future efforts. The GoLite Index is helping us make better decisions, and we think it will help you do the same.
The GoLite Index™ measures:
- Environmentally Preferred Materials
- More than 60% of our company carbon footprint is attributable to the materials we select. We have direct control over the selection of these materials. Thus, we have the direct ability to reduce a product’s footprint as well as our overall company footprint.
- Responsible Production
- For every GoLite employee, there are more than 100 other individuals at the manufacturing level who are directly impacted by our sourcing decisions. We seek to continuously improve the work environment for these people through careful selection and monitoring of our factories.
- The transport of raw materials has an impact on the environment. We can directly influence this impact by limiting the transportation distance of the primary raw material used in each product we manufacture.
- Education + End-of-Life Programs
- Significant environmental impact occurs once you purchase a product. In fact, over the life of a product, the environmental impacts of laundering a product can often be higher than the impacts of making a product. We want to help you to extend the useful life of your products and to minimize its impact through product care education, reuse/repair programs and, at end-of-life, a product take-back program.
Example of the GoLite Index™ Product-Level Scorecard
How Do We Calculate The GoLite Index™ Scores?
Using stringent criteria based off of our sustainable design principles, we created a weighted calculation methodology to give us a set of scores for each product. We are taking responsibility for our products’ impact from the design phase all the way through to the end of the finished product's life. By focusing the scores on our products’ highest impact areas, we can ensure our sustainability efforts are focused in the right place.
Each of our three main reporting lenses contains calculations based on a number of quantifiable criteria for which we collect data and perform audits to verify. We generate guidelines for our product development team to follow and provide weighting factors for each category so that our highest priority impact areas are most heavily weighted. This keeps our focus on those high-impact areas but also generates valuable information about areas with less significant impacts so we can seek to improve in all areas. The calculations are fairly complicated, but the final Index score is intended to be easy to understand.
The following table is a summarized version of our actual calculation table. In the actual table, each of the guidelines along the left of this table is broken down into smaller criteria that are easier to build metrics for and track. This should give you a good idea of your any other product’s score was reached.
Still have questions? Feel free to email us at sustainability@golite.com.