A traditional sustainability certification can take six to eight weeks and thousands of dollars in consultancy fees, and still leave purchasers wondering whether the claims actually hold up. Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai, thinks he can deliver a more useful answer in 10 minutes. His London-based startup is building a universal credibility score for sustainability — a 1,000-point rating, drawn from roughly 100 public data points, that measures whether what a company says about its environmental and social performance is consistent with what its audited filings and regulatory disclosures actually show. The premise borrows directly from consumer credit scoring: a FICO score doesn’t tell a lender whether you’re a good person, only whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. On this episode of Sustainability In Your Ear, Martin explains how EarthRating’s “accelerated impact engine” gathers verified data instead of relying on questionnaires, and why the small and mid-sized businesses now caught up in the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and the UK’s Procurement Act 2023 need an affordable way to prove their credentials.
Most sustainability frameworks rely on self-reported questionnaires; EarthRating pulls data from audited annual reports, regulatory filings, press coverage, and marketing materials, then cross-checks them against each other to surface contradictions before they become a regulatory or reputational problem. A near-term emissions target that appears in a press release but not in the audited annual report is exactly the kind of credibility gap the platform is designed to flag. Importantly, EarthRating isn’t measuring environmental impact — it’s measuring whether a company’s story is internally consistent and externally verifiable. That sidesteps the impossible problem of reducing carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable question: are the claims true? That speed and accessibility comes with real caveats, and Martin and I dig into them. A credibility score isn’t an impact score: a small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to electric mowers could rate higher than a multinational with aspirational but unverified net-zero pledges. That’s the right calibration for measuring trust, but it isn’t the same as measuring environmental performance. EarthRating also exists at “Google 1.0,” in Martin’s own words — a launch-stage platform with a proprietary methodology that hasn’t yet been externally audited. Global standards aren’t willed into existence; they’re earned through adoption. The underlying problem EarthRating is trying to solve — making credible sustainability measurement accessible to the businesses that have been priced out of it — is a real one, and worth watching.
To find out more about EarthRating, visit EarthRating.ai.
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Interview Transcript
Mitch Ratcliffe 0:09
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon-neutral society, and I’m your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation today.
We’re going to talk about, well, in a way, credit scores. Every sustainability claim made today faces the same fundamental problem: we lack a credible common language that quantifies a business’s impact on planet and people. A company, of course, can call itself sustainable simply by cherry-picking a single metric, commissioning a favorable audit, or simply repeating the word often enough that it seems to stick.
However, regulatory pressure is tightening. The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive now covers roughly 50,000 companies, and the UK’s Green Claims Code is actively prosecuting misleading environmental marketing. Here in the United States, the SEC’s climate disclosure rules are still in effect, although they are under attack. Of course, regulation alone doesn’t solve the underlying problem. Businesses, investors, and consumers still lack a fast, affordable, and trustworthy way to evaluate whether a sustainability claim actually holds up.
Our guest today is Martin Johnston, founder of EarthRating.ai. It’s an early-stage company building what it calls a universal credibility score for sustainability. The Earth Rating is a 1,000-point scale generated in minutes using AI and verified data from a company. It’s designed to measure, manage, and monitor sustainability performance across businesses of all sizes, from a regional landscaping firm to a global fashion house.
But unlike legacy frameworks built for large corporations with dedicated sustainability teams and consultancy budgets, EarthRating is designed to be accessible to small and medium-sized companies. They constitute the vast majority of economic activity worldwide and have been almost entirely locked out of credible sustainability measurement. EarthRating’s core proposition is that sustainability credibility should work more like a credit score — standardized, legible, and universally available — rather than opaque, expensive, and inconsistent.
So we’re going to talk with Martin about what makes a sustainability score genuinely credible, rather than just another layer of greenwashing; how EarthRating’s methodology handles the inherent incompleteness of any single score across carbon, water, biodiversity, and governance; and what guardrails prevent businesses from gaming the system he’s designing. We’ll dig into who the primary audience for an Earth Rating actually is — whether it’s regulators, investors, supply chain partners, or even consumers — and how the company is thinking about the gap between giving a business a number and actually changing its behavior. We’ll also look at the roadmap: what EarthRating is building, which markets it’s targeting first, and what would have to be true for a startup like this to become the universal standard it’s aiming to be.
You can learn more about EarthRating at EarthRating.ai. EarthRating is all one word, no space, no dash. EarthRating.ai. So can a single AI-powered score do what decades of sustainability frameworks have failed to accomplish — make environmental credibility fast, affordable, and impossible to fake? Let’s find out right after this brief commercial break.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:43
Welcome to the show, Martin. How are you doing today?
Martin Johnston 3:45
Oh, yeah, not bad, actually. Thank you very much.
Mitch Ratcliffe 3:47
Well, thanks for joining me. We had a really interesting conversation a couple of months ago about what EarthRating is up to. And I want to start off by asking — you’re describing this as a universal credit score for sustainability. What will make EarthRating credible when so many sustainability scores and certifications have been accused of serving mostly as marketing tools?
Martin Johnston 4:07
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think the difference between us and other people really is the fact that we can summarize it in three words: we don’t actually ask, we find out. Where most other frameworks are reliant upon questionnaires and self-reporting — and I know a lot of them are now catching up on verifying the data and that kind of stuff — we’ve built an accelerated impact engine that gathers 100-plus data points and feeds them into a scoring system where we can verify what people are saying against what they’re actually doing. We search for verified information and verified data, and therefore what comes out of the platform is quite a good indication of the maturity of where a company is at from a sustainability perspective, based on evidence and based on real data, rather than based on a questionnaire that someone else has filled in for them.
Mitch Ratcliffe 5:13
Can you describe briefly what kind of data you get when you make that assessment?
Martin Johnston 5:18
Yeah, I can describe it. Obviously, I don’t want to go too much into detail, but we research the four pillars of sustainability — so human, environmental, economic, and social. Data that comes out includes things like: Is it verified carbon measurement? Do they have a near-term target? Do they have a future target? We then assess whether that is actually verified by an independent body. So it’s not just what the company says about itself — has it actually got third-party endorsement? From there, what we can then look for is any flags or any conflicting statements, because we go into detail from actual reports that have been signed off by their accountancy teams, versus what the press and what marketing materials say. It looks to verify that data and compares the conflicts. So from our point of view, it’s not really a certification. It’s a B2B tool which allows organizations to genuinely use it in an impactful way. It’s not there to scrutinize and be used as a lens so other people can jump on the bandwagon of having a go at businesses who are trying to do the right things and be positive towards the planet and the people who live on it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:40
Roughly how long does it take to establish that score once I decide to do it as a company? What does the timeline look like?
Martin Johnston 6:48
To be honest with you, it varies, but we’re talking minutes.
Mitch Ratcliffe 6:52
Minutes?
Martin Johnston 6:53
We’re talking anything up to 10 or 15 minutes. We can do it sometimes in three or four. It depends on the veracity of the information we’re searching for, how much information is available, and whether we have to cross-check that information using our accelerated impact engine. Literally, the speed is how quickly we can ascertain that information — whereas, you know, comparable processes take six to eight weeks for a certification, and 12 months-plus for others.
Mitch Ratcliffe 7:27
Sustainability measurement is fragmented across carbon, water, biodiversity, social impact, the human implications that you described a moment ago. How do you handle that kind of inherent incompleteness in any single score? And how does EarthRating express explicitly what it doesn’t measure as well as what it does?
Martin Johnston 7:49
Good question. Well, we’re measuring the credibility — this is our differentiator. We measure the credibility of what an organization is saying, rather than the impact itself. So what we look for is: What does an organization say it’s doing? What claim is it making? And then we offer data to verify that claim. That’s why it’s a credit score in the true sense of the word — a credit score is actually credibility. That’s what credit means. It’s based on the idea of trust: if you are paying back your debts to your financial institutions on a regular basis within the timeframe and show that you can manage your financial responsibilities in a considerate way, you will get a good trust score, which is what a credit score is. That means you are a good opportunity for underwriters to look at and say, ‘Yeah, you’re a good person to loan my money to. I live where I live, I bank with the right bank, I’m on the electoral roll, and I have a credit history of doing the right thing on a timely basis.’ If you take that financial model and recategorize it to sustainability and change the inputs — are the claims credible? Are they historically valuable? Do they prove themselves time and time again, consistently? — when you do that, you build up a nice picture of an organization that you can actually trust on what it’s claiming to do. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Mitch Ratcliffe 9:15
That’s interesting. You think about the timeliness of a credit score, which goes down if you don’t use credit. At some point, it will be necessary to be on the system on an ongoing basis. But how frequently would a review be completed? Or is this integrated into the businesses’ systems in such a way that it’s just a continuous score?
Martin Johnston 9:39
Okay, so we’re kind of in launch process at the moment. We’re doing Google 1.0 — not what Google is now, but what Google was back then. For us, we are continuously going to be checking, but continuously means we’ll be giving updates on a quarterly basis to organizations. However, we want to move this to real time, because we believe that, in the words of Douglas Adams, bad news travels fast. If a claim that an organization is making hits the headlines, then that needs to be alerted to the business — just like a credit score has alerts which say somebody’s checked your file, somebody’s looking at your profile, an underwriter or whatever. We think the same process has to happen for businesses to be able to respond quickly and responsibly to potential threats or risks.
Mitch Ratcliffe 10:32
I was particularly intrigued by your focus on small business. Can you explain what a landscaping company, for instance, or maybe a regional logistics firm, might actually do with the sustainability score? Who are they going to show it to, and why does it matter to them to do it?
Martin Johnston 10:50
To be honest, this is the current problem for small businesses. Inherently, reporting on sustainability is too costly, too time-consuming, overwhelming, and confusing. The whole thing needs to be looked at from a complexity level. That means that 91% of small businesses do not report on sustainability at all, yet they make up the vast majority of the economies of the world. If you combine the numbers and the impact, and the ability we could give if small businesses have the same opportunities as larger businesses to report on sustainability — and we break those barriers down — then that allows a business to operate in a world where sustainability needs to be taken a lot more seriously. It needs to be shown as innovative and commercially valuable, not just a nice-to-have. In the UK particularly, we’ve got the new Procurement Act, which has come out, and if you cannot show sustainability and the progress of sustainability for your business, you could be excluded from government contracts. You could be excluded from the largest supply chains. Bigger businesses are looking to regulate their supply chains and their ESG claims throughout, because they’re responsible for their own supply chains. That means small businesses, if they can’t do this, might risk losing or reducing their work or opportunities to gain work. And then the biggest thing as well is tender writing. If we can give them an instant ability to showcase where they sit on a maturity level of sustainability, and how easy it is for them to implement a reporting process that takes minutes, not months — not even years — and costs no time at all in terms of labor to produce, then that removes the bureaucracy and the friction that small businesses face when trying to come up with stuff that they’re required to do for procurement.
Mitch Ratcliffe 12:56
A credit score is typically paid for by another organization that wants to see how my credit is, or my business’s credit is. What’s the business model? You described it as a B2B metric. Am I going to, when I’m reviewing a supplier, pay you to get a rating?
Martin Johnston 13:11
The idea is that eventually, when we process this out and it’s a bit more mature and the business has grown, then, yeah, we will be hopefully selling the reporting processes that organizations can pay for. But for us, this is a tool for a small business to use to implement and to make sustainability actionable, so they pay for it, and they pay to be on the platform.
Mitch Ratcliffe 13:32
Could you also begin to roll up individual entities’ carbon impact? For instance, there’s Scope 1 and 2 emissions, in order to provide some other organization up or downstream visibility into their impact, so they could calculate their Scope 3 score?
Martin Johnston 13:49
Yeah. Well, this is also interesting, because sustainability has a complexity attached to it where consultancy is required for stuff like that. So what we’ve done, and what we are doing, is we’re building a sustainability navigator, which effectively is a tool that sits on a platform. If they need to understand where to go and get their SBTi carbon Scope 1, 2 or 3, or need to do something that requires heavy lifting in terms of what sustainability metrics look like for their business, then our sustainability navigator will point them to the right places without the fees of a consultancy — £800 to £1,500 a day.
Mitch Ratcliffe 14:35
Okay, so this is where the AI comes in. As you’ve developed this guidance you just described, what is it based on — for instance, the SBTi standards? How did you develop the methodology that it’s going to use to coach those small businesses? Because that’s really an interesting opportunity.
Martin Johnston 14:55
Yeah. Well, we’ve been doing sustainability for quite a while, and I’ve looked at all of the frameworks. We haven’t sort of adopted any particular one. But what we do understand is the standardization of questions that are being required through tenders and through responses by businesses. We’ve developed 100-plus data points, which we developed our own over a number of years. It’s proprietary information that we gather. It’s not based on any one framework, but the sustainability navigator will point them to people who actually can help them — organizations that can give guidance in the right way. So that’s what we’ve done. That’s what we’re aiming to do. It’s still in its infancy, and we’re in launch mode, so we’ve got to do more of the doing, rather than more of the talking about what we’re going to do in order to implement this stuff.
Mitch Ratcliffe 15:54
It does sound like one of the functions of that AI guidance in the future could be to look across the market space and say, ‘Here’s a partner who can solve this problem for you.’ Becoming the marketplace, in the long run.
Martin Johnston 16:08
No, absolutely not. It’s not a way to become the marketplace at all. It’s a three-in-one platform. It provides a credit score instantly — or almost as instant as you can be — which gives information to an organization showing how well they are performing against the four pillars of sustainability and where the information gaps are. We then have a Green Claims Code checker, so we actually go out and search for: Are they compliant with the Green Claims Code? Is there anything out there that could put them at risk, and is that affecting their credit score effectively? And then we have the sustainability navigator, which can help them correct anything, fill in the gaps, or provide them with information to say, ‘Look, these are the best three things you can do to increase your score and make the immediate impact you need to do.’ We’ve got a growth mindset built into the platform. The idea is to reward the businesses that want to improve quickly and get them on the journey. Because even having a low score — that’s the difference between us and everybody else. There’s no pass/fail. It’s not negative. A low score is, ‘Well done. You’re on the journey.’ It’s not ‘You need to improve.’ It’s ‘You’ve made the step, you’ve made the commitment, you’ve made the positive commitment to actually want to do something that’s positive for your business.’ For me, commercially, sustainability leads to innovation, it leads to cost efficiencies in the long term, and it helps businesses future-proof themselves. So it’s an absolute no-brainer to want to do something that protects the business from itself in the future.
Mitch Ratcliffe 17:50
You are at the launch stage, and Google version 1.0, as you just said. What are you finding that early customer discussions are pointing towards in terms of what they’re most interested in — the continuous monitoring, the transparency in their supply chain, getting benchmarked?
Martin Johnston 18:08
The most interesting thing is the fact that we do all the work for them. They’re astonished. They say, ‘Well, what do we have to do?’ And we say, ‘Nothing. You give us your company name, you give us your company registration number, and we do the rest.’ The fact that they don’t have to fill in a questionnaire, the fact it doesn’t take them weeks to produce answers to all of these questions, the fact that it’s not labor-intensive — that’s the game changer, we think, which will be the non-bureaucratic, non-burdensome process that stops businesses from wanting to do good.
Mitch Ratcliffe 18:41
Simplification. And we’re talking about an incredibly complex system that’s growing more so all the time, especially with the growing impact of climate change on all of our businesses. This is, I think, a great place to stop and take a quick commercial break. I want to dig into a lot more of this. We’ll be right back. Folks, stay tuned.
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let’s return to my conversation with Martin Johnson. He’s founder of EarthRating.ai, which aims to make environmental impact an easily measured and understood business metric with a universal credibility score for people and planet. So Martin, as we were talking about, this is an immensely complex problem, and you’re at this early stage, still gathering a lot of interest from organizations. What does your roadmap look like? And what are the particular areas of complexity you think you can tackle in the next 12 to 18 months?
Martin Johnston 19:35
Some interesting questions there. I think you’ve nailed on something — the landscape for sustainability is incredibly complex, and it shouldn’t be. The reality is that it took rocket science to get us off the planet, but we only need trees, water, and air to breathe and live on it. So we need to simplify sustainability, and that’s our purpose. The whole idea is to look at how we can make it easier, simpler, and less complex for businesses to start to report and then create operational efficiencies by making the right decisions for their business. The whole concept of sustainability is really about literally the word ‘sustain’ and ‘able.’ If you aren’t doing the right things, you’re putting your business at risk in the future. There’s supply chain risk, demand risk, regulatory risk, and reputational risk that all need to be put into the mix when you start to think about what the future looks like for your business. For us, the roadmap really is to create a universal — and ‘universal’ doesn’t necessarily mean the same; it means available to every business. Making that available to every business means we need to break those barriers down, which create the complexities, and allow businesses to start doing the right things, rather than spending time, money, and energy on reporting the wrong things. That’s where we need to change the system. We need to create a new operating system for sustainable business. Look at how we can then seriously make inroads, so it becomes almost the standard, if you like, by simplifying sustainability and getting mass adoption as quickly as we can. That’s the aim.
Mitch Ratcliffe 21:25
What would you describe as the most important question you can help a business answer about itself or a supplier in the next couple of years? Let’s talk simplification. Bring it down to that level.
Martin Johnston 21:38
I guess the simple question is: if you’re looking to regulate your supply chain and you’re looking to de-risk your supply chain as an organization from above, you need to know that your supply chain is saying what they’re doing and actually implementing what they’re doing — not just saying the right things to help them win tenders, because they’d be putting everybody at risk. So what we’re doing, first of all, is just absolutely putting the credibility back into what sustainability is for businesses and for people. And then what that means for a smaller business who’s looking upwards is that they can show they’re on the journey, show they’re good enough to win and be part of a regulated supply chain, and actually want to be in an ecosystem where businesses think beyond profits and balance sheets — because it’s commercially not astute not to. It’s because it’s commercially the right thing to do.
Mitch Ratcliffe 22:43
When we talked a couple of months ago, when we first met, you mentioned that you’re focused on — and this is a quote — ‘detecting credibility gaps early.’ Can you describe what a credibility gap is going to look like in practice, and how your monitoring will catch it, particularly before it becomes a reputational crisis for the company?
Martin Johnston 23:02
Yeah. One of the things we are doing, as I said right from the beginning — and we didn’t make this statement, Douglas Adams did — bad news travels fast. Bad news travels really quickly, and the ability for businesses to put out statements which are unintentionally wrong is where this goes pear-shaped for them. The well-intentioned statement by any large organization is genuinely probably well-intentioned, but when it doesn’t take total impact into consideration, it can then be taken out of context and actually be untrue. That’s where you need to look at the regulatory complexity and the gap in the marketplace. Look at the statements that they’re making applying across the board. So it’s total impact considerations, actually saying, ‘You can’t say that, because over here you’re not doing it.’ That means you can pull out what could be a compliance risk, a damaging reputational risk, and an opportunity for fines risk, and show businesses, ‘This is how you should be rephrasing this, or sourcing some evidence to prove it,’ before you then spend loads of money on an advertising campaign and getting it all wrong.
Mitch Ratcliffe 24:26
One of the concerns that a lot of people have when we talk about artificial intelligence and sustainability, frankly, is a credibility problem in and of itself. Models can hallucinate. The training data could be biased, and as you’ve pointed out, verification can be really hard. How do you validate all of the inputs and the AI inference that is applied to those inputs when generating the score?
Martin Johnston 24:52
Yeah, okay. There is a lot of hallucination in AI, which is why we use it very minimally. The idea is the gathering of the data. If you take a credit score model, it gathers realistic data from all kinds of places. It then aggregates that data, and that aggregated data can give you a very solid viewpoint of what you can do. You can then potentially use AI to look into that data — which you know is correct — to give you the right information much quicker than if you were to do it with human eyes. That’s the thing you have to do: gather the correct data, the right data, and evidence against that data. The other good thing you can do is compare data sources from one to the other, and by doing that, show the gaps from, say, a news source against the annual report. The annual report will be signed off. The annual report will be true. The annual report will have an accountancy stamp all over it to say this is legally correct. So what you need to do is look at the legally correct information, take the legally correct information, benchmark it against marketing information, and showcase where things could go wrong. That is not necessarily a hallucination AI job. That’s just using AI to show how you can display data quicker than you could do in any other way. But you have to still gather the data and gather the data sources, which is why our accelerated impact engine has gathered all of that. It’s taken years to build. It’s not just sticking something into Claude and saying, ‘What do you think of this?’
Mitch Ratcliffe 26:23
Specialized models are going to be particularly important as you think about the emergence of a universal standard, which, of course, you’re trying to build. What has to be true in terms of the technology — our ability to integrate into systems and do these kinds of credibility checks — in terms of regulation? Do you need to have… as you pointed out, the UK government has a new procurement law. The European Union has transparency laws in terms of the sustainability and environmental impact of a variety of products. Is that all moving in the direction to support your work?
Martin Johnston 26:56
No, I don’t think we need more regulation. I really don’t. I think AI maybe needs regulation, but that’s not what I’m about. It’s not what we’re here to talk about at all. I think the point is, sustainability and more regulation, more red tape, will just stop businesses from doing it. The best example of self-regulation we have in this country is the Law Society, and it’s a system which everybody adopts, everybody understands and learns. It’s almost like the industry self-regulating. I think we need to get businesses to understand that they need to self-regulate against stuff. That’s where sustainability can actually start to take a much bigger impact and a much bigger step forward — if we actually lost a lot of the regulation. For example, you have repurpose and recycling, and then so much insurance invalidation from using materials that have been used before, because of the risks involved. Yet the questions behind that are not necessarily commercially correct. It’s just that the risk is too great. So I think regulation, and imposing stuff on businesses — particularly around wanting to be more sustainable — is just another tax that they don’t need. Innovation moving forwards, doing the right things to de-risk their business from future demand, from future supply chain restriction because of global issues around the world that stop things from happening or trap movement from happening, and international trade being available, is something that needs less friction, less friction — rather than more barriers.
Mitch Ratcliffe 28:44
In the long term — and I’m asking you to think maybe five or 10 years out in the future — who’s the ultimate consumer of the EarthRating score? Does it include investors, and maybe ultimately consumers who would say, ‘Is this business one that I can trust to be sustainable?’
Martin Johnston 29:00
I think that’s a good question, actually. In five years’ time, the aim really is for us to be globally recognized, like a credit score for environmental and social impact — transparent, credible, and recognized worldwide. We’d love investors and consumers to look at it and back businesses with real sustainability credentials, which doesn’t involve greenwashing. It drives demand for genuine impact. Honestly, if we could build this into finance so the highest scores influence lending — they influence decision-making — so that sustainability becomes a strategic financial advantage, that would be incredible. And to finalize it all off, access for small businesses — giving them the tools and the resources to adopt sustainable business practices — is probably the biggest opportunity for us as a race to make a difference to the planet and the businesses that are on it.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:11
Based on what you’ve learned so far, what’s your advice for a small business that’s thinking about its sustainability moves? Where would you urge them to focus first or second?
Martin Johnston 30:22
I’d obviously go and get yourself an EarthRating.
Mitch Ratcliffe 30:24
Well, beyond that, what would make their EarthRating score really shine?
Martin Johnston 30:31
Well, I think what they need to do is look at their business model. The best businesses solve problems, and they expressly say so through their brand. For example, you’ve got Tony’s Chocolonely in Europe — I don’t know if you have them in the US — although they exist to eradicate poverty in chocolate supply chains. They’ve got an open supply chain methodology, and they’ve grown exponentially by doing something really positive and being really good, then showcasing the problem they solve for the world through their brand. Patagonia do it as well — ‘Don’t buy this jacket.’ All the best brands are universally challenging what a marketing campaign looks like. But I’m actually going back to what they stand for. Where do they fit into this world, and what difference can they make? A small business should apply the same model: What are you doing? Why are you here? And what difference can you make? Then start championing that, because that’s an authentic positioning that no one can copy. That’s most important for any business — to start operating in a way that amplifies that process, because that means you’ll engage suppliers, you’ll engage partners, you’ll engage opportunities, and create advocates for brands and businesses more than any other way. In doing so, you’ll automatically want to adopt sustainable business practices, which just make you a better business.
Mitch Ratcliffe 31:56
I think of an orchestra when you describe that. A lot of people will focus only on the rhythm section or only on the violins because that’s what they do, but they have to see themselves in this larger picture — the way that Patagonia or Tony’s Chocolonely does, where they’re trying to help and create opportunities and solutions for the world, rather than simply meet some demand. As you design EarthRating, how do you describe that vision for your contribution to the larger world?
Martin Johnston 32:23
You just mentioned an analogy I really like — the orchestra. If you take it up to a bigger stage, you know, we’re called Earth, and the only reason we are alive on this planet is because we operate and are located within a larger solar system, where the gravity of the worlds pulls us in a way where we are equidistant from the sun, which allows life and oxygen to exist, right? So if you can take that orchestra analogy and explode it out to the solar system and then bring it back to the planetary system, to the ecosystem — we’re all part of it. It’s really important to understand that, to play a part in its future, we need to think in systems. We need to think system-wide. You can’t operate in isolation, because you just don’t operate within a structure where impact matters — if you don’t understand what your impact is on others.
Mitch Ratcliffe 33:21
You’ve got to look up, take a wider view of the world, it sounds like, and I wholeheartedly agree with that perspective. Now you’re early. You’re still collecting a lot of interest from people. How can folks — say, a small business — get involved with EarthRating.ai?
Martin Johnston 33:39
Well, we’ve got a holding website up there, which you can sign up to, and we can get in contact with you. We’ve also got a LinkedIn page, and I think those are the best two ways. Yeah, that’s probably the right way to go — to EarthRating.ai and register interest, and then we can get in contact. We do need adoption at scale. So yeah, one of the things we want to do is to challenge and transform sustainability by simplifying the whole thing and making it easier, more accessible, and more available to a larger audience group than it currently is.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:15
Well, Martin, thanks very much for a fascinating conversation.
Mitch Ratcliffe 34:23
Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You’ve been listening to my conversation with Martin Johnston. He’s the founder of EarthRating.ai, an early-stage company building what it calls a universal credibility score for sustainability claims. You can learn more about Martin and his team’s work at EarthRating.ai. EarthRating is all one word, no space, no dash. EarthRating.ai.
Artificial intelligence has incredible power to find, organize, and systematize large amounts of unstructured information, which humans have plenty of — though its reasoning over that information may not always be sound. AI’s promise for sustainability work, which, as Martin pointed out, is to gather and analyze far more information for contradictions that undermine the credibility of a company’s claims that it achieves a reduced environmental and adverse social impact, is significant. But it’s early days for AI and EarthRating, and they’ve made a lot of promises that we’re going to have to see whether the technology and EarthRating can keep.
EarthRating doesn’t try to measure a company’s environmental impact. It measures whether the claims a company makes about its impact hold up against the evidence available in the public record. So like a FICO score that doesn’t tell a lender whether you’re a good person, this tells them whether your behavior is consistent enough to be trusted. EarthRating proposes to do the same for sustainability claims by pulling roughly 100 data points from audited reports, regulatory filings, news coverage, and marketing materials, and then flagging the gaps between what a company says and what the verifiable record shows.
The promise of a sustainability credibility score generated in minutes, not the six to eight weeks a conventional certification takes, would deliver simplicity. If that works as advertised, it would represent a real application of AI to a problem that has resisted simplification for two decades — the slow, expensive, fragmented mess that sustainability reporting has become. But perhaps we can take simplicity too far.
So two ideas from this conversation come wrapped with a healthy stack of promises still to be kept. The first is the reframe itself — credibility instead of impact. This is interesting because it sidesteps the impossible problem of trying to reduce carbon, water, biodiversity, and social performance into a single comparable number, and replaces it with a more tractable one: whether a company’s statements are internally consistent and externally verifiable. That has obvious value for procurement teams under, for instance, the UK’s new Procurement Act or the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which now covers about 50,000 companies and is pushing accountability down the supply chain.
But there’s a limit to transparency too. A high credibility score means a company is telling the truth about what it does, but it doesn’t mean the company is necessarily doing enough. A small landscaping firm with a modest, well-documented commitment to, say, electric mowers and edgers could rate higher than a multinational with ambitious but aspirational net-zero targets that have not been independently verified. That’s probably the right calibration for a trust score, but it’s not the same thing as an environmental performance score. As we’ve discussed with prior guests, the limits of single-metric thinking in a systems world are that every framework leaves something out, and the question is whether the thing it leaves out matters more than the thing it captures.
The second idea is the small business democratization play, and this is where the opportunity is largest and the proof is thinnest. Martin cited a striking number: 91% of small businesses don’t report on sustainability at all, even though they constitute the vast majority of economic activity worldwide. The reasons are exactly as you’d expect — cost, frameworks built for companies with dedicated sustainability teams, and bureaucracy that is overwhelming for a regional logistics firm or a five-person landscaping outfit. If EarthRating can give those companies a credible, low-friction way to participate in regulated supply chains and government tenders, it solves a real economic exclusion problem.
But the platform is, in Martin’s own words, at Google 1.0. And I was there when Google 1.0 was launched, and it did some important and interesting things that set it apart. But it was a launch-stage project with a proprietary scoring methodology — the PageRank algorithm — that wasn’t yet externally audited, and it had no business model. They were still trying to work that out. The vision for EarthRating to become a global standard that influences lending decisions and consumer trust is genuinely interesting, but global standards aren’t willed into existence by founders. They’re ratified by customers, by usage, embraced by regulators, and ultimately require widespread education to ensure that the seal of approval it grants is well understood in the market and not just another meaningless symbol or certification.
So let me add one note of friction here. Martin made the case that sustainability needs less regulation, not more, and that self-regulation is the path forward. I don’t think the historical record supports that argument. The real reason that small businesses are suddenly facing sustainability scrutiny at all is because of the regulation. The UK Procurement Act, the EU’s wide-ranging environmental and circular economy programs, and the SEC climate disclosure rules here in the United States are pushing sustainability reporting down the supply chain. EarthRating exists in a market that regulation created. That’s not a knock on the product — it’s an observation about the soil that it must grow in.
So count me intrigued, but with asterisks. An AI-powered credibility score for sustainability claims is a useful idea, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses that have been left on the sidelines of the reporting economy. Whether EarthRating becomes a standard or is absorbed by a larger framework is a question only adoption will answer, and so we’ll be watching.
Hey, and would you do me a favor? If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, please share it with a friend or a family member. You folks are the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends and family that they can check out more than 550 episodes in our archive and hear us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible, or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform does help people find us. Thank you for your support.
I’m Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Sustainability In Your Ear, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let’s all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a Green Day.
The post Sustainability In Your Ear: EarthRating’s Martin Johnston On Making Sustainability Claims Creditable appeared first on Earth911.
https://earth911.com/podcast/sustainability-in-your-ear-earthratings-martin-johnson-on-making-sustainability-claims-creditable/
The ethical and sustainable furniture companies featured below offer everything from sustainable office chairs and desks to bed frames and storage furniture (with a whole lot in between)!
I’ve curated this selection of ethical and environmentally friendly furniture companies to bring you everything you’d need to furnish your space consciously, whether you need sustainable bedroom furniture, living room furniture, dining room furniture, or outdoor furniture.
This is your ultimate guide to finding the very best in sustainable furniture.
Note that this guide does include affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you choose to purchase via these links at no additional cost to you. As always, brands we curate meet strict standards for sustainability and design, and are brands we love that we think you’ll love too.
What is Sustainable Furniture Anyway?
Just as with anything with the word sustainable in front of it: there’s a lot to consider when it comes to sustainable furniture! Below is a list of elements to get started with.
Secondhand Furniture
The most sustainable furniture is the furniture that already exists! Shopping for used furniture prevents that piece from being landfilled and reduces the need to produce new furniture. Looking secondhand is also a way to get affordable sustainable furniture.
I shop for secondhand furniture quite a bit so I have an entire guide to the best places to buy and sell used furniture if this is something you’re interested in. You might also enjoy listening to my podcast episode with secondhand interior designer Nina Verduin.
Some easy options to get started with our Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, OfferUp, or Buy Nothing Groups on Facebook. Local furniture resale shops, garage sales, and estate sales are also good options if you have a bit more flexibility in what you’re looking for and would rather shop in person.
Personally I’ve had the best luck with Facebook Marketplace and secondarily with estate sales. Or even grabbing a few furniture pieces I couldn’t believe my fellow apartment dwellers were dumping out!
For more curated selections of secondhand furniture, this is what I’d suggest after an embarrassing amount of hours spent browsing furniture resale marketplaces!
AptDeco
AptDeco is a mecca for buying and re-selling furniture in nearly every category from various brands—including West Elm, Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel. There’s also often quite a few beautiful vintage furniture available on the site.
Chairish
Chairish is an online destination to sell and buy used furniture, mostly vintage furniture. The secondhand furniture site has a massive collection of furniture in every category, no matter how specific, that you may be looking for. However, it tends to be more expensive than other secondhand marketplaces since they have more of a focus on vintage furniture, including some collectible or high-demand items.
Eco-Friendly Furniture Materials
Below is a list of eco-friendly furniture materials that a sustainable furniture company might use:
- Reclaimed or sustainably harvested wood (look for labels like FSC-Certified)
- Recycled steel or recycled aluminum for metal furniture
- Natural fabrics like organic cotton, hemp, and linen or recycled fabrics for upholstery
- Natural Dunlop latex, Talalay latex, or CertiPUR-US® certified foam
- Recycled or natural fiber fills for pillows and cushions
- Low to zero-VOC finishes and stains, such as linseed oil
Interested in non-toxic furniture specifically? Check out our Non-Toxic Furniture Brands Guide.
You’ll see a few certifications throughout this guide. Here’s what each one actually covers:
- FSC Certified = the wood sourcing was responsibly managed (not a finish, foam, or textile guarantee)
- GOTS Certified = the fabric meets strict organic and safety standards, including labor protections throughout the supply chain (a textile-specific certification, not a wood or foam guarantee)
- GOLS Certified = verifies that latex foam is made from certified organic latex, meeting strict environmental and safety standards throughout production (a latex-specific certification)
- CertiPUR-US® = the foam is made without ozone depleters, PBDE flame retardants, mercury, lead, or formaldehyde, and meets low VOC emission standards (a synthetic foam certification, not a claim that the foam is natural or organic)
- GREENGUARD / GREENGUARD Gold Certified = the finished product was tested for low chemical emissions, with Gold representing the stricter tier
- MADE SAFE® = one of the more comprehensive certifications available, screening against a list of thousands of chemicals known or suspected to harm human health; assessed at the product level, though it’s still worth checking which specific products a brand has certified rather than assuming it covers their entire catalog
Responsible and Locally-Made Furniture
An ethical furniture company should be considering their workers, ensuring safe conditions and fair wages.
Ideally, the brand would produce their furniture domestically to minimize emissions and increase transparency of their supply chain. Some of the furniture brands in this guide even own their own manufacturing facility, which is a major bonus!
Since I am based in the US, a lot of the brands in this guide are USA Made furniture companies.
Check the furniture company’s About or Sustainability pages to see if they include any information about the factories they source from or the craftspeople and furniture artisans that they partner with to produce their pieces.
Other Sustainability Efforts
In addition to environmentally-friendly materials and fair production standards, sustainable furniture brands likely have several other sustainability initaitives.
These might include:
- A take-back, resale program, or secondhand marketplace
- A repair program or ability to buy replacement components
- Reforestation projects that replenish forests beyond the trees sourced for their furniture
- Donation initiatives to environmental or social justice organizations
The Best Sustainable Furniture Companies
I know that there is a lot to sort through when it comes to sustainable furniture, so my goal is to make that search easier.
Below are my top picks for sustainable furniture stores, environmentally friendly furniture companies, and secondhand furniture marketplaces that are doing things better.
That might mean they are sourcing eco-friendly materials, using safer finishes and fabrics, producing locally and ethically, considering the full lifecycle of their products, or all of the above!
For more on what we consider “sustainable furniture” scroll down to the bottom below the brands!
1. Urban Natural
Best for: finding all of your furniture and decor in one place
Responsible furniture retailer Urban Natural curates a variety of furniture brands that meet at least three of their five sustainable sourcing criterion: Ethically Sourced, Handcrafted, Organic Materials, Made Sustainably, and Made in the USA.
That said, as a multi-brand retailer, sustainability standards vary somewhat by which specific brand or maker you land on within their catalog, so you may want to check each individual brand’s credentials. My top picks are Copeland, Ethnicraft, and GRAYN.
Furniture Categories: Seating, Beds, Tables, Storage, Outdoor Furniture
Price Range: $256 (shelf nightstand) – $6,865 (storage bed)
Shipping: Ships within contiguous U.S. (contact for overseas logistics)
2. Medley
Best for: a full range of sustainable furniture across rooms
Medley Home is an eco-friendly furniture company that handcrafts their pieces in California with sustainably-sourced materials. The company uses domestically-sourced hardwoods from FSC-certified forests. Medley Home’s wood pieces are finished naturally with a blend of beeswax, carnauba wax, and olive oil.
For sofas and chairs, you can choose between CertiPUR-US® certified foam (less expensive but synthetic) or certified organic natural latex (natural but more expensive).
And for upholstery choose from natural fibers like OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified linen or GREENGUARD Gold certified cotton (my recommendation) or GREENGUARD Gold certified polyester (not my pick sustainability-wise, but you may prefer a performance fabric).
Furniture Categories: Seating, Tables, Beds, Storage, Accent Furniture
Price Range: $595 (poufs) – $10,290 (sectionals)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S. (or contact Medley for a quote)
3. Savvy Rest
Best for: furniture with top of the line organic materials
Savvy Rest creates functional, sustainable furniture with your health and the planet’s health in mind. The eco-friendly furniture brand sources only the best natural and organic materials for their furnishings, like hemp and certified organic cotton fabric, natural Talalay latex, and responsibly sourced solid hardwood. You can also choose between a variety of zero-VOC stains or no finish for their wood furniture.
Since the pieces are made to order by a small business, they don’t accept returns, but reviewers rave about the product quality and service.
Furniture Categories: Seating, Beds, Tables, Accent Furniture
Price Range: $400 (bedside table) – $3,999 (sofa) | Use code CONSCIOUSSTYLE20 for 20% off!
Shipping: Contiguous U.S. (Or contact for quote)
4. Avocado
Best for: furniture meeting high sustainability standards without compromise
The Certified B-Corporation crafts both their furniture in a FSC-certified facility in Los Angeles and uses materials like 100% reclaimed wood and responsibly-harvested American timber. Additionally, the majority of Avocado’s offerings have certifications like GREENGUARD Gold and the MADE SAFE® seal.
Avocado has fewer options than some of the other companies on this list, but what they do carry is beautifully designed. And I’m all for quality over quantity!
Furniture Categories: Beds, Side Tables, Storage, Accent Furniture
Price Range: $349 (side table) – $3,999 (full bed frame)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S
5. Thuma
Best for: minimalist, modular GREENGUARD-certified furniture
Thuma first started with their simple platform bed frame, made from repurposed rubberwood, and has since expanded into categories like tables, storage, and seating, all keeping their minimalist aesthetic and commitment to sustainability.
The highlight for me is their modular storage system — mix and match open shelf and closed drawer modules as you need to create a nightstand, bookshelf, credenza, dresser, or media console.
Furniture Categories: Beds, Storage, Tables, Seating
Price Range: $495 (nightstand) – $6,675 (corner sectional)
Shipping: Ships within U.S. and Canada (international customers can use freight forwarder)
6. WHAT WE MAKE
Best for: truly reclaimed wood furniture
Based in Chicago, WHAT WE MAKE is an environmentally friendly furniture company that crafts modern furniture from reclaimed materials.
While this is a claim others make without much to back it up, I appreciate that the brand is transparent around where they source their wood — it comes from old Midwestern barns being torn down. The small business also makes the furniture start to finish themselves in Chicagoland and each piece is completed with zero-VOC finishes.
Furniture Categories: Bathroom Vanities, Tables, Storage, Seating
Price Range: $425 (bar stools) – $6,425 (bathroom vanities)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S.
7. Sabai
Best for: repairable furniture that considers the full lifecycle
Sustainable by design, my favorite part about Sabai isn’t just their use of responsible materials, but that their seating is actually repairable and adjustable. You can also purchase replacement parts, slipcovers, or expansion kits.
Not to say their materials aren’t great — you can choose between recycled velvet, upcycled poly, cactus leather (a vegan leather made partially from cactus leaves; be mindful this contains polyurethane) or a natural blend of organic cotton and hemp (my personal top pick).
The frames are made from FSC-certified wood and Sabai uses mechanical fasteners in it’s upholstery process instead of glue, low-VOC stains for their domestic maple legs, recycled fiber fills, and CertiPUR-US® certified foam.
Furniture Categories: Seating, Tables, Accent Furniture
Price Range: $495 (side table) – $6,295 (sectional)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S.; ships to HI & AK for fee
8. Natural Home by The Futon Shop
Best for: futons and Japanese-style beds
As you might guess, The Futon Shop makes sustainable futons, but they also have other furniture like bed frames, including Tatami beds, and sofas (modular, sectionals, and sofa beds).
The woman-founded furniture and mattress company uses eco-friendly materials such as certified organic cotton, organic wool, organic Dunlop latex, OEKO-Tex 100 certified coconut coir and hemp, as well as solid domestically sourced hardwood — all made in the US.
Furniture Categories: Futons, Beds, Sofas
Price Range: $699 (ottomans) – $5,449 (custom sofa)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S. (custom quotes elsewhere) | also offers free in-store pickup
9. Greenington
Best for: sustainable bamboo furniture
Greenington is a bamboo furniture company with sustainably-crafted pieces for every room: from the office to the bedroom. Each piece is made from mature Moso bamboo — one of the fastest growing plants on the planet — that was hand-harvested instead of clearcut. Greenington also uses 100% of the bamboo material, down to the sawdust.
Greenington’s classic line uses laminated solid bamboo strips, while their exotic line uses bamboo fiber bonded with adhesive under heat and pressure, which is a more composite-like process. They don’t specify the adhesive’s VOC or formaldehyde content for either line, so I’d ask directly if that matters to you, especially for the exotic collection.
Furniture Categories: Beds, Seating, Storage, Tables
Price Range: $329 (side table) – $4,139 (dresser)
Shipping: Free contiguous U.S. shipping; HI, AK, PR + Canada shipping available for a fee
10. MasayaCo
Best for: supporting reforestation projects with each purchase
With origins as a reforestation project, MasayaCo is deeply committed to (beyond) sustainable sourcing. They’ve planted 1.2 million trees to date and on average, leave 40% of their reforestation projects completely untouched.
The elegant furniture from MasayaCo is crafted by artisans using teak, and many of their pieces are outdoor friendly too. Something to note though is that the woven elements on some of their stools and chairs is polyester cord.
Furniture Categories: Seating, Storage, Tables, Accents, Outdoor Furniture
Price Range: $295 (stool) – $7,850 (sectional)
Shipping: Ships to U.S.
11. Green Row
Best for: sustainable furniture with a vibrant cottagecore vibe
With wooden furniture featuring elements like scalloped edges and spindle legs alongside upholstery with floral or gingham prints and ruffle edges, Green Row’s sustainably crafted pieces are designed to fit right in amidst your vintage finds.
Part of the Williams Sonoma family, Green Row blends decades of furniture know-how with a commitment to social and environmental standards built from the ground up. Products are made with materials like FSC-Certified wood, natural latex and organic natural fibers.
Furniture Categories: Seating, Tables, Beds, Accents, Outdoor Furniture
Price Range: $299 (stool) – $10,199 (large sofa)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S.
12. Healthier Homes
Best for: natural material seating, storage, and accents
Founded by expert healthy home builders, Jen and Rusty Stout, Healthier Homes is committed to helping you curate a healthier indoor space. And they’ve recently made some great design improvements with their furniture selection too.
On their site, you’ll find furniture — largely seating, storage, and accent tables — made from materials like teak, acacia, mango wood, and jute. Some of their furniture is also “paint it yourself” (not for me, but if you love DIYs, don’t forget to take a look at their selection of zero VOC paints too!)
Furniture Categories: Seating, Small Tables, Storage
Price Range: $185 (bench) – $4,799 (dining table)
Shipping: Contiguous U.S.
Honorable Mentions:
- Saatva: mostly a mattress company, but they have beds as well. Saatva is a member of the Sustainable Furnishings Council and sources responsibly-managed wood and has an option for linen upholstery (other upholstery options are plastic fibers), however the exact fiber content of the linen option isn’t disclosed. Due to their limited selection of furniture and the lack of information on their upholstery, they didn’t make it into the full guide.
- West Elm: Furniture company West Elm has some more sustainable collections to their offerings. The company defines “sustainably sourced” as furniture made either from reclaimed wood or FSC-certified wood from responsibly harvested sources. This doesn’t mean that all of the materials were sustainably sourced, or that every product was made with sustainable practices, which is why this is an honorable mention, and not part of our main guide.
Looking For More Eco-Friendly Furniture Guides?
Sustainable Storage: Dressers, Media Consoles, and Sideboards
9 Eco-Friendly Bookcases to Showcase Your Latest Reads
The Best Sustainable Tables To Gather Around
Questions You Might Have:
Is “sustainably sourced” a meaningful claim, or just marketing language?
Good question! 
It depends on what backs it up. As West Elm’s honorable mention shows, “sustainably sourced” can mean anything from FSC-certified wood to a much looser internal standard like quality. The term itself isn’t regulated, unfortunately. Look for a specific certification (FSC-certified for wood, GOTS-certified for organic fabrics, GREENGUARD Gold for testing against harmful chemical emissions) and specific practices and materials, rather than the phrase alone.
What’s the difference between “sustainable” and “non-toxic” furniture?
The short version is they can overlap but they aren’t the same thing.
Sustainable furniture focuses on how materials are sourced and how long a piece lasts — think FSC-certified wood or reclaimed materials. Non-toxic furniture focuses on the impact to human health (usually the consumer’s health, not the maker’s health, though those things can also be interconnected) — like VOCs, formaldehyde, flame retardants. A piece can be one without being the other. For a deeper breakdown of non-toxic-specific criteria, see our Non-Toxic Furniture Brands guide.
The post 12 Best Sustainable Furniture Companies Worth The Investment (2026) appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.
12 Best Sustainable Furniture Companies Worth The Investment (2026)
Fall is already such a magical time – leaves changing colors, crisp air, apple orchards, pumpkin patches. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most marketed times of the year.
And they just keep trying to push it on us sooner. I’ve seen fall drinks and decor marketed as early as July.
Truth is, you don’t need a new sweater or pumpkin spice everything to enjoy fall. You need to embrace the season’s magic. Dare I say, whimsy.
Whimsy has been trending, and while I love the idea of it, I’ve also noticed it being repackaged into something brands can sell. Which kind of defeats the purpose?
By definition, whimsy is something ‘freaky, odd, off-beat’ – not exactly something you can buy en masse. True whimsy isn’t performative or sellable. It’s a state of being, a feeling.
Being whimsical should come from your own imagination. Learning new hobbies, being ok with being bad at things, infusing more fun into your days in ways that make you slow down. Even better if it gets you out of the house, into nature, and socializing with friends, family or community.
Here are some whimsical fall activities that will get you off your phone and into the world.
take a nature walk – but with a twist
Going leaf peeping around your neighborhood is a simple way to connect with the outdoors. But if you want to add some whimsy into it, why not challenge yourself to find certain colors, patterns or textures?
It’s fun to take a little journal with you and sketch items of interest you find – maybe it’s a beautiful tree, a squirrel burying their nuts, a field of asters and goldenrod. Taking time to notice is pure magic.
Plant blindness is real – challenge yourself to get familiar with the flora around you. Check out a library book all about native plants and see if you can spot any on your walk.
You may be surprised to learn how many plants are invasive (burning bush is a big one here in Maine!).
Having a fall scavenger hunt is also a fun idea you can get your friends involved in. Challenge them to find an oak leaf, acorns, crabapples – whatever type of fall flora is in your area – and see who can find them first!
write gratitude letters to your loved ones
Snail mail is making a comeback, so why not write to those you care most about? Sometimes it can be hard to say the things we mean in person. But writing helps us sit with our feelings and work through them.
If you need ideas, why not write them:
- Reasons why you love them
- Your best memory together
- How much you appreciate them
- Plans you’re excited to do together
- What you admire about them
Who wouldn’t want to receive a heart-felt letter in the mail? You can make it extra special by slipping in a small little trinket – like a bird feather, a pressed flower, your favorite tea, or a packet of seeds.
And no – you don’t need any fancy stationery to do this. Make it your own by simply using some computer or scrap paper and upcycling an empty envelope. You can decorate it with colored pencils and markers if you like.
join a knitting circle
Who needs to buy a fall sweater when you can knit one? Consider finding a knitting (or crocheting) community in your town you can join. Often times they’ll meet up to exchange supplies and knit together.
Challenge yourself to knit something that pays homage to fall. Whether that be a pretty fall color (think gem-tones like ruby red, golden yellow, etc.), or knitting leaves and/or mushroom patterns, the choices are endless.
Yarn swaps are also growing in popularity – if you can’t find one, create one yourself!
All you have to do is encourage people to meet up at a public place (a park is nice) and bring any yarn supplies they’d like to donate.
And when all else fails – ask your grandmother! She may know a thing or two about knitting, crocheting, sewing, or embroidery. And how fun and cozy would it be to knit something together?
RELATED: Sewing Machine For Beginners: How to Get Started (And Why It’s a Sustainable Skill to Learn)
host a fall-themed cafe at home
Does your friend group love to visit cafes? Why not host a little cafe at home? Put your baking skills to the test and make some cozy fall inspired recipes.
Some drink and recipe ideas:
- Pumpkin spice cinnamon rolls
- Apple cider donuts
- Mulled apple cider
- Chai lattes
- Pumpkin spice coffee
Of course, if you’re not a baker you can still participate by asking your friends to bake some goodies to bring. Or grabbing some fresh pastries from your local farmers market.
You can display the goodies on your dining room table, countertops, or island. Just make sure you have to-go boxes at the ready (or encourage your friends to bring their own)! You don’t want anything going to waste.
Leftovers? Eat them yourself or share with your community. Your neighbors might appreciate a fresh cinnamon roll – and it’s a great way to start a conversation.
host a fall-themed craft night
Whether you make fairy homes, carved pumpkins, or leaf garlands – it’ll be a night to remember! Gather your friends and choose a theme for the night that revolves around fall.
Even better if you’re able to find all your materials locally (aka through foraging or from a farm stand) or thrift them. Thrift stores have tons of decorations, art supplies, and fabrics on hand at much cheaper prices.
Last fall I decorated a pumpkin with leaves and compostable glue (pictured above). I thought the glue would dry clear…but hey, it was a fun experiment. Just goes to show – don’t be afraid to be bad at something or make mistakes! That’s part of the fun.
The craft you pick will depend on your interests and skill levels, but you can’t go wrong with a paint and sip night.
The challenge? Paint a fall scene (be it an autumnal forest, an apple orchard or a pumpkin patch). Best painting wins something that fits with the theme – homemade apple sauce or an apple pie scented candle works.
go on a spontaneous adventure
Why not go on an unplanned day trip and see where it takes you? Maybe you’ll find a cute cafe to stop inside? A cozy locally owned bookstore? A family farm selling homemade apple pies?
Walking or biking around town will help you slow down and see spots you might’ve missed while driving. Plus it’s a great way to admire any changing leaves.
If you prefer a little more structure to your adventure, make a whole day of it. Even better if you gather a few friends or family to join in on the fun.
Here are some fun fall activities you can do as a group:
- Go or apple and/or pumpkin picking
- Visit a corn maze
- Go on a ghost tour
- Tour old mansions or graveyards (if your city allows it)
- Have a cozy fall picnic
- Take a hike
- Tell spooky stories around a bonfire
- Go stargazing (take a blanket and thermos!)
RELATED: Ultimate Fall Bucket List: Budget Friendly + Printable Bingo Card
What are some ways you’re bringing whimsy into your life this fall? Let me know in the comments below!
The post 6 Whimsical Fall Activities To Get You Off Your Screen appeared first on Going Zero Waste.
These brands have all types of sustainable socks for just about all of your footwear or around-the-house needs, from no-shows and performance-ready ankle socks to comfy crew-length and cozy knee-high socks.
I originally wrote this guide about four years ago, and I must say that sustainable socks have upped their game since then. We’ve been able to raise the bar on what it takes to get included in this guide.
What Qualifies as (More) Sustainable Socks?
There are several criterion I’ve used to determine the brands in this guide. Some brands meet several of these criteria and some even meet all of the criteria below.
- Use of at least 70% natural and organic materials, like organic cotton, hemp, and organic wool
- Uses certified organic materials and sources from certified GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard) factories and/or Fair Trade factories
- Minimal to no use of synthetic fibers, preferring recycled when there are some synthetics used
- Use of either no dyes, natural dyes or low impact dyes
- Responsibly manufactured, ideally locally made or produced in fair trade environments
You’ll find that most of the sustainable socks in this guide do have a small percentage of synthetics for some stretch. (Though there are three brands with 100% organic cotton socks — check them out below!) I like to use a Guppyfriend Washing Bag to prevent the microplastics from synthetic textiles from being released into our waterways.
In case you have sensitive skin or want a pair of organic socks with an even lower environmental impact, there are also several brands with dye-free sock options.
As mentioned, the brands featured in this guide have all types of socks whether you’re looking for breathable moisture-wicking socks to play tennis in or comfy socks to cuddle up and say warm with. However if you’re looking for more substantial slippers, my guide to eco-friendly and ethical slippers will be a better bet.
The guide features affiliate links. As always, we only feature brands that meet high standards for sustainability that we love — and that we think you’ll love too!
Where to Find Sustainable and Organic Socks
1. Cottonique
Best for: latex-free organic cotton socks for sensitive skin
Materials: 100% GOTS-Certified Organic Cotton
Price: $18 for Kids (3 pairs) | $23-$28 for Adults (2 pairs)
Categories: Quarter, Crew, Ankle, Kids
Cottonique is the only brand I’ve found so far that sells exclusively 100% organic cotton socks. Founded by and designed for individuals with skin sensitivities, Cottonique’s socks are free of latex, spandex, or any other synthetic stretch.
The socks are also OEKO-TEX Standard 100 certified and sewn in the brand’s owned GOTS- and B Corp-certified factory in the Philippines.
I tried out the brand’s crew-length socks and found them to be quite comfortable, and I appreciated the ribbed detail. Without elastic for stretch, they fit snug in order to stay in place, so it’s important to get the right size! I wear a shoe size 7.5-8 and the medium was perfect.
2. Q for Quinn
Best for: soft, dye-free organic cotton socks
Materials: 98 – 100% Organic Cotton
Price: Kids’ from $10 | Adults from $15 / Pair
Categories: Ankle, Crew, and Trouser Socks
Made from 98% GOTS-certified organic cotton (with one pair of socks made of 100% cotton), Q for Quinn’s socks are breathable and super soft. One reviewer calls them the “softest socks I’ve ever worn!” and hundreds of other customers giving five-star reviews seem to agree.
Q for Quinn also has organic dye-free adult and kids’ socks perfect for sensitive skin.
3. Maggie’s Organics
Best for: 100% merino wool socks
Materials: 73% – 99.8% Organic Cotton | 60 – 100% Organic Merino Wool
Price: From $8.50 / Pair
Categories: Footie, Ankle and Crew Socks; plus Allergy, Recovery, and Diabetic
Sourcing GOTS-certified organic fibers and knitting all of their socks in the US, Maggie’s Organics is the real deal when it comes to sustainably-made socks.
The company is also committed to “Real Fair Trade” — they invest in the wellbeing of their farmers and suppliers and are on a journey to become employee-owned.
4. Rawganique
Best for: 100% natural fiber socks (cotton, linen, and wool)
Materials: 100% Organic Cotton, 100% Hemp, and 100% Wool Options
Price: From $12 / Pair
Categories: Anklet, Crew, Knee-High, and Dress Socks
If you’re looking for plastic-free socks, you will love Rawganique. The brand has several options of 100% natural fiber socks that are free of polyester, spandex, or nylon. Select from breathable 100% organic cotton socks, temperature-regulating 100% linen socks, or cozy 100% wool socks.
There are also several options of organic socks blended with a bit of synthetics for some stretch. These options will likely be more suitable for sport and hiking use.
5. Organic Basics
Best for: core-color basics with recycled synthetic blends
Materials: 70 – 75% Organic Cotton
Price: From $14 for 2-Pack
Categories: No-Show, Ankle, Crew, and Knee-High Socks
Focused on only the essentials — and doing them well — Organic Basics creates a range of quality organic socks in core colors like black, gray, blue and white. While these (more) sustainable socks do contain a percentage of synthetics, the majority of the synthetic content is recycled. I also appreciate that the product pages suggest a cooler washing temperature of 30C since clothing care and cleaning can make up a significant portion of a product’s total impact.
6. PACT
Best for: GOTS-certified organic no-show socks
Materials: 75 – 83% Organic Cotton
Price: From $14 for 2-Pack
Categories: No-Show and Crew Socks
PACT’s organic cotton no-show socks are made in a Global Organic Textile Standard certified factory. The no-show pairs come in basic black, white, and tan as well as some cute prints. They feature a new design and silicone grips to make sure they stay in place. That said, the socks unfortunately only come in one size — some of the reviewers who wear a shoe size 9 note that they are a bit too small for them.
7. Harvest & Mill
Best for: Naturally-colored dye-free cotton socks
Materials: 88% Organic Cotton
Price: $10 – $12 / Pair
Categories: Ankle and Crew Socks
Sustainable basics brand Harvest & Mill uses USA-grown and spun cotton for their ankle and crew organic socks. While these socks might look dyed with their earthy colors, they are actually completely dye-free — the natural color cotton varieties Harvest & Mill uses are naturally a muted brown or green.
8. tentree
Best for: hemp-blend white socks that plant trees
Materials: 71% Hemp and TENCEL
Lyocell
Price: $10 – $14 for 2-Pack
Categories: Ankle, Quarter, and Crew Socks
Socks are the crucial foundation of any closed-toe shoe and tentree’s basics are here to ensure you’re always putting your best foot forward. Crafted from a comfortable blend of hemp, TENCEL Lyocell, recycled polyester, their socks come in several lengths in basic pairs.
Plus, every pair plants 10 trees (the reason for their namesake ten-tree).
9. Conscious Step
Best for: giftable cause-driven organic socks
Materials: 75% Organic Cotton
Price: $15.95 / pair
Categories: Ankle and Crew Socks
Conscious Step’s socks are made with Fairtrade and GOTS-certified organic cotton and recycled polyester. The brand’s organic cotton socks are made with an exceptional quality too — with some even featuring a cushioned insole and arch support. But perhaps what this brand is really known for is that each design is associated with a different cause where a portion of your purchase goes.
10. Kind Socks
Best for: organic socks with fun prints
Materials: 80% Organic Cotton
Price: $12 – $14 / pair
Categories: Crew and Ankle Socks
KIND Socks is a Black-owned sustainable sock brand using GOTS-certified organic cotton for their vibrant collections. With prints like monstera leaves, watermelons, and bumblebees, KIND Socks will bring a touch of whimsy to any outfit.
The post 10 Sustainable Socks Made with Organic Fabrics appeared first on Conscious Life & Style.
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