I am delighted that HannahMaria Shanahan is apart of Dayrize. This is my first wholesale platform my brand is onand hopefully it will not be my last. Dayrize is a new online wholesale website that selected the best sustainable and ethical businesses in the UK to sell their products. I started the journey with Dayrize a few months back and I am very grateful to be apart of it, and finally going live on their website this month. Here is some information about Dayrize and their unique score system they have in place.
The following data is sourced from Dayrize website.
Who is Dayrize?
Dayrize brings together the best sustainable products on the planet, so you don’t have to spend time scouring the internet for great products. Each brand needs to pass strict criteria to be even listed on the Dayrize website. From the time it’s sourced to the moment it lands on your doorstep – and even what happens with it beyond that. Technology is developed specifically for that purpose: the Dayrize Sustainability Assessment Tool, which uses complex algorithms combined with geospatial analytics and other datasets cross-referenced against five recognised dimensions of sustainability to assess and standardise the environmental impact of every product.
The Dayrize Sustainability Assessment Tool
Dayrize brought together a renowned team of scientists with a shared passion for sustainability, and developed The Dayrize Sustainability Assessment Tool. Their own proprietary technology, built specifically for one purpose: to know and understand the environmental impact of every product. It’s really complex and groundbreaking technology but the simple output is that number in the yellow circle. The Dayrize Score. And it means for the first time ever, they can accurately compare the environmental impact of products as we shop.
5 dimensions of sustainability
Circularity: how well an individual product minimises waste by reusing and recycling resources to create a closed loop system
Climate Impact: how greenhouse gas- intensive the production of the product has been
Ecosystem Impact:how heavily a product impacts biodiversity and water depletion
Livelihoods & Wellbeing: how each product impacts the health and wellbeing of the people involved in creating it
Purpose: how meaningful a product’s purpose is by looking at the value that it provides, and the potential it has to be an accelerator for good.
Sustainable products
At Dayrize, they set a pretty high bar for what we mean by a sustainable product.
Definition: A truly sustainable product is one that fulfils a meaningful purpose, is designed in a circular manner, is non-hazardous, responsibly sourced, fully recyclable, is either low-impact or regenerative across a range of impact indicators, and supports the health and well-being of people and ecosystems at every stage of its life cycle.
Just imagine a world where every single product fulfilled this definition. There would be no waste! People would be dancing in the street! And, of course, nature would finally be allowed to thrive.
That’s where the Dayrize Score comes in. Simply put, the Dayrize Score is a measure of how closely a product adheres to their ambitious definition of product sustainability. The higher the score, the closer a product is to sustainable perfection.
Keeping the bar high
It’s not easy for products to actually score 100%. HannahMaria Shanahan has a score of 67 which is excellent. Any score about 40 is already pretty sweet. That’s partly because before they even consider listing products on Dayrize, the brands have to ensure they fulfill the following criteria:
no child labour
no forced labour
no animal testing
fair compensation
safe working environments
no uncertified sourcing of high-risk commodities (like palm oil)
no increased threat to endangered or at risk species
no carcinogenic, mutagenic, or reproductive toxins
no microplastics
They have a third party verification agency conduct spot checks on their partner brands to ensure the accuracy of what they report to us. Once products have passed that hurdle, they get to the data crunching. They collect a whole lot of information about every product listed on Dayrize: the materials it’s made of, where those materials were sourced, the manufacturing processes that were used, any ecolabels the product has, and a lot more, which we collect directly from our partners.
Dayrize then use this product-specific data, in combination with a range of global datasets, to calculate how the product is performing on each of the five sub-dimensions that make up the Dayrize Score:
Ecosystem impact
Climate impact
Livelihoods and wellbeing
Circularity
Purpose
Each of these dimensions has real impact on both people and our planet – and accordingly on every product’s Dayrize Score.
Ecosystem impact
Our ecosystems are under threat. Humans have modified 75% of the Earth’s land surface for our own uses; we have lost 50% of the world’s coral and 85% of its wetlands (IPBES, 2019). This dimension of the Dayrize Score evaluates the likelihood that a product is contributing to negative impacts on our global ecosystems. Dayrize evaluate this in two ways:
Biodiversity impact: the primary driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss is when humans take natural land, like forests or savannahs - and turn it into agriculture or build factories. To calculate our biodiversity impact metric, we itemize all of the raw materials in a product, and we assess how much land was needed to produce those materials. This is particularly relevant for products made of biological materials requiring agricultural inputs, e.g. cotton sourced for producing textiles, ingredients in home and beauty products, or any food products. Based on the production practices used to make those materials, we’re then able to assess how much natural habitat was displaced. But we don’t stop there: we also consider where this natural habitat was displaced – for example, was it in a rainforest with high levels of native biodiversity? Dayrize calculation is based on the methodology for the Biodiversity Impact Metric, developed by the University of Cambridge and the Natural Capital Impact group.
Water depletion: you may have heard that freshwater only makes up 3% of all of Earth’s water – and most of that is actually locked up in glaciers or underground. The available 0.5% of water that we’re able to use is a precious resource, and it’s under stress in many parts of the world. In fact, 2.4 billion people around the world are living in water scarce areas[2] – and our use of water puts additional pressure on ecosystems that also need water to thrive. To calculate this metric, we assess the water footprint of each product: the water needed to produce the raw materials in the product, as well as water used in manufacturing. We use the location of sourcing and production to analyze not just how much water was used, but, more importantly, how much the use of that water contributed to water stress. We use the World Resource Institute’s Aqueduct tool as the basis for this geospatial analysis.
Sources for the Ecosystem Impact Score:
Ecoinvent 3.7
Biodiversity Impact Metric developed by the University of Cambridge and Natural Capital Impact Group
World Resource Institute’s Aqueduct 3.0
Farooq H, Azevedo J, Belluardo F, et al., 2020, WEGE: A new metric for ranking locations for biodiversity conservation. Divers Distrib. 2020;26:1456-1466
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Data
Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) datasets
Climate impact
Climate change is real, it’s happening, and it’s bad. We’re in a race against time to drive down greenhouse gas emissions to stay in line with the roadmap of staying below 1.5 degrees centigrade of average global warming. To calculate this sub-score, Dayrize generate an estimated carbon footprint of each product. We consider emissions from fossil fuel use, transportation, electricity use, industrial gases, and land use change: basically everything that can result in greenhouse gas emissions. They consider both emissions from the product as well as its packaging, using life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) data from Ecoinvent. They calculate the carbon intensity of the product and standardize it to kg CO2eq per kilogram of product, which allows them to make comparisons between different types of products. Dayrize look specifically at the following life cycle stages:
Resource extraction
Manufacturing
Distribution
Within the greenhouse gas accounting industry, we refer to different “scopes” (1, 2, and 3) to describe the range of activities that have been included in a carbon accounting assessment. With that perspective in mind, here we are considering scopes 1 and 2, as well as part of scope three.
Dayrize sources for the Climate Impact score:
Ecoinvent 3.7
Bertoli S., Goujon M., Santoni O., 2016, The CERDI-SeaDistance database, FERDI
Google Maps API
Final energy consumption in the industry sector by the Dutch Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek
Prodcom database by Eurostat
Circularity
Have you heard about the circular economy: a paradigm for creating an economic system that is waste-free and regenerative by design. Moving toward a circular economy has become an important priority for governments and companies around the world. But achieving circularity involves a lot more than just getting much better at recycling. Dayrize needs to design products in such a way that they are actually possible to recycle, sell them using business models that encourage long-term use, and make it easy to repair and reuse products. In an ideally circular economy, high value materials will circulate indefinitely or be safely reincorporated into biological cycles - reducing our need for new sources of virgin material. To assess how well a product is driving forward the ambitions of a circular economy, we look at its performance on the following indicators:
Circular material content: we define this as the percentage of reused, recycled or regeneratively produced material in both the product and its packaging
End-of-life business model: we assess whether a product has a take-back scheme for reuse and how well it presents information for end-of-life handling to customers.
End-of-life recyclability: we evaluate the potential for the materials that the product is made of to be recycled at high-quality at the end of a product’s useful life.
Product lifetime extension: we check if there are services in place that can actually extend the lifetime of the product, such as repair services or replacement parts
Dayrizes sources for the Circularity score:
Primarily academic research, especially: Singh et al, 2019, Evaluating approaches to resource management in consumer product sectors - An overview of global practices, Journal of Cleaner Production, vol 224, p218-237, Elsevier
Livelihoods and wellbeing
The word “sustainability” is often most closely associated with protecting natural ecosystems, but an equally important dimension of sustainability is the health and wellbeing of people across product value chains. Though we require all partners to ensure that their products are made with respect and care for the people involved in the production of their goods, Dayrize uses a sustainability assessment tool to rate how well people are treated as well as to flag any risks that we want to take an extra look at. They ask their partners to provide detailed information about the level of remuneration, working conditions, and rights of the workers across their supply chains. Then, using a range of datasets - such as those provided by the International Labor Organization - we screen whether any of the materials in the product are associated with any risks across the following categories:
Child and forced labour
Living wage
Working hours
Discrimination (gender wage gap)
Collective bargaining
Occupational health and safety risk
Unemployment benefits
Pension benefits
If Dayrize identify a risk related to the material inputs and sourcing locations for a product, they require partners to provide third-party assurance in the form of relevant labels or certifications to guarantee that these risks have been managed. We scrutinize the quality of the labels themselves to ensure that they are legitimate and respected sources of truth.
Our sources for the Livelihoods and Wellbeing score:
ILOSTAT database
UNICEF
Global Slavery Index (GSI) & US Department of Labor’s (ILAB) forced labour data
Wageindicator.org
World Bank Open Data
Purpose
It is very difficult to create a product that has zero negative impact. Manufacturing a product always requires raw materials and energy; the Dayrize Score is designed to make it easy to identify the products that have the lightest footprint. But if we’re really going to deliver on our mission of “bringing consumption within planetary boundaries,” then we also need to ensure that we’re not using scarce and valuable raw materials for the creation of products that are not fundamentally adding value - or are potentially leading to an unsustainable lifestyle by virtue of what they’re used for. For example, you can have a very sustainably-produced electric pepper mill, but you might ask whether you really need an energy-using device to grind your pepper. Likewise, we want to reward products that are designed to support more sustainable behaviour or eliminate impact: like bicycles that facilitate more sustainable mobility or reusable goods that replace disposable alternatives.
In this part of the Dayrize Score, we evaluate two primary factors, which we use to capture the functional sustainability of products beyond just the impacts associated with their footprints:
Value provided: Here we assign points to a product based on the categories of functional value that a product and its associated business model provide users and society (e.g., is it an essential good? and if not, does it meaningfully fulfill an important function?).
Impact displacement potential: To calculate this metric, we assess whether the product is an enabler of more sustainable behaviour relative to common alternatives (e.g., in the case of a reusable product replacing disposable alternatives).
Dayrize sources for the Purpose score:
Academic research, incl. the various interpretations of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs concept
Other literature research, incl. “The 30 elements of Consumer Value,” 2016, Harvard Business Review
Putting it all together
Once Dayrize have calculated a product’s performance across all these dimensions, thats where they bring them together to generate the final Dayrize Score - a number that ranges from 0 - 100, making it simple to compare a broad variety of products on their sustainability performance. We also publish how well products are doing on all of the different sub-dimensions of the Dayrize Score, so you can easily see the categories in which products excel. Products must have a Dayrize Score of at least 20 to be listed on Dayrize at all.
The methodology behind the Dayrize Score was developed by Metabolic, some of the biggest sustainability and circular economy nerds on the planet. They also receive support from a range of academic institutions and NGOs on the annual review of the Score to ensure we’re keeping up with the latest science.
The range of impact comes from the fact that 60-80% of our impact as people comes from our household consumption (REF), of which 40 - 60% of that comes from the consumption of products (REF). So that means the consumption of products contributes 24-58% of our total impact footprint. In addition, it’s important to know that "impact" isn't uniform - there's climate impact, water impact, biodiversity impact, etc. Different types of products contribute to different degrees across these impact categories. Both of these variations contribute to this range.
This data is sourced from Dayrize website.