FAQs | Earthmark

What is an Earthmark?

An Earthmark is a simple five-leaf score that reflects a brands' environmental performance. Earthmarks range from 0, representing businesses operating as usual with little to no impact on mitigating the effects of climate change, through to 5, representing businesses optimising positive impacts through regenerative business practices.

How is Earthmark different from other sustainability certification bodies?

Earthmark is here to bring order to the chaos, doing the search for you by aggregating global data from verified, trusted, and published sources to provide a single, simple view. Our aim is to make environmental performance accessible and comparable for all.

How is an Earthmark created?

Earthmark exists to bring businesses and consumers together to make sustainability simple and transparent for everyone to make informed choices. Based on Earthmark’s guiding principles, our tools search the vast data pool of industry-leading certifications and third-party verified databases to ensure the result we present is the latest, most trustworthy, and robust information available.

Earthmark considers the industry and size of a business, current and future committed environmental performance (i.e. emissions, carbon intensity and net-zero targets) as well as selected third-party certifications to get an accurate, representative view.

Please note that the ratings are intended to be of an indicative nature and are based on the latest available information that can be obtained. The results of the ratings provided are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a certification or verification of sustainability performance by Earthmark. As a user of this information, you are free to form your own opinion based on the information presented by Earthmark.

Why are Earthmarks needed?

Consumers need to know their actions are making a positive impact on the world and Earthmarks help consumers to simply make an informed decision.

Research shows that 57% of consumers are willing to change their shopping habits to reduce negative environmental impact (IBM). A whopping 88% of consumers want brands to help them live sustainably, but 43% believe brands make it harder (Forbes).

What are your principles?

These are the principles Earthmark sticks to as it develops scores for businesses. These ensure that Earthmarks remain accurate, fair and representative.

Transparent: We use publicly available information from published reports and/or open third-party sources. If information is not available, this demonstrates poor environmental governance and has a negative impact on scoring.
Recent: Businesses publish annual and sustainability reports at different times of the year. To ensure that an Earthmark can be reasonably considered to be “up to date”, we apply a limit of only including data sets that are less than, or equal to, three years old.
Relevant: Our focus is primarily on environment and, specifically, carbon emissions. Earthmark considers total scope emissions (1-3), seeking to understand current performance as well as intended future performance through any science-based reduction targets. Earthmark doubles down on data relevant to a business' environmental performance. Other factors such as energy and waste usage are also considered where data exists.
Relative: We want people to be able to compare apples with apples. In order to do that, we ensure Earthmarks are relative to industry and business size. For example, we calculate current environmental performance through the carbon intensity measure (emissions per employee).

Please note that Earthmarks are intended to be of an indicative nature and is based solely on the latest available information that can be obtained. The results of the ratings provided are for informational purposes only and should not be construed as a certification or verification of sustainability performance by Earthmark. As a user of this information, you are free to form your own opinion based on the information presented by Earthmark.

Scoring scale

Earthmark offers four packages, each dependent on the number of Earthmarks required and how many territories (countries/markets) these will be used in. Please enquire now for a quote.

Do you have feedback on our approach or would like to see how, as a brand, you could improve your Earthmark?

Earthmark levarages publicly available data. If it isn't available online, it can’t be assessed. If there's public data you believe is missing, please share it with us below.