The Subject
Our consumption always has a direct impact on our environment and the climate. In order to better understand and classify these individual environmental impacty, we as consumers need more transparency. For example: How sustainable are the products we buy? What is the average CO2 value of a product? How much water was used in its production? Under what conditions was it produced?
Product innovation towards more sustainability, responsible consumption and the successive reduction of climate-damaging environmental impacts, such as the individual CO2 footprint, are at the top of the agenda towards climate neutrality.
As a non-profit, the Organisation for Sustainable Consumption (OfnK) relies on partnerships and actively promotes dialogue between all stakeholders involved, including political associations, companies, startups, non-governmental organisations and research institutions in order to connect them to who we are all: consumers.
The common language we are working on is a unified data foundation that serves as an objectifiable basis for measurement.
Our solution
The Open Sustainability Register – OSR –
is a platform that centrally collects sustainability information directly related to our daily consumption. We create transparency in payment transactions, because transaction data allows conclusions to be drawn about the individual environmental impact of consumers. We have developed an open standard for the financial industry, which is used by various players in the industry. The standard is supplemented with receipt data to increase transparency directly in the retail sector.
The result is a knowledge platform on which average values for climate impact data (CO2, water consumption, land use, etc.) are managed. Average values are made transparent, measurable and comparable at product level within their classes. To record and classify these data, the OSR integrates the commodity groups of the internationally valid Harmonized System (HS) of the World Customs Organization. This records all tradable goods in 97 chapters and over 5,000 subheadings and ranks them according to tariff.
