Up in Ontario

Consumer Reports' Green Choices

Consumer Reports, that bastion of reliable, honest product assessment, has turned its attention to evaluating products for the green consumer. After my first glance at the site I thought it seemed a little thin on content. Then I dug into the ratings and found a great wealth of product information, geared to someone looking to consider their environmental impact in their purchasing decisions. Hi!

I looked a little deeper into the Autos section and found that our car rated an 85 out of 100. Not bad, though I'm not entirely clear on how the ratings are compiled. An Audi S4, for instance, a sports car with a V8 engine, had the highest rating at 99 out of 100. Perhaps there's some measure of power generated per unit of fuel used?

(Sidenote: To see if I could suss out the S4 a little more I opened a new browser window and typed in audi.ca, figuring I'd find myself on an Audi homepage for Canada. No dice. What I found is a domain squatter homepage. Ah, www.audicanada.ca works. Nice cars, folks, but the web strategy needs some basic attention.)

Other great sections on the Consumer Reports Green Choices site include Appliances (air conditioners, dishwashers, garbage disposals, fridges, and washers/dryers), Home & Garden (compost bins, gas cans, water filters), Electronics (batteries, desktop computers) and Food (fish, meat).

The Food > Meat section is the most relevant to me since the information provided there affects purchase decisions I make every week. For the past few months I've moved away from supermarket meats towards meats from a small, local butcher shop that sells a wider selection of meats of higher quality. The grass-fed ribeye steak I barbecued last night was a gem.