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Corporate Social Responsible News: Office Depot + NASCAR's Backpack Giveaway; Mashable's Social Media/Social Good Conference; Elegant Roots Presents Be Sweet's CSR-Guided Goods

When consumers can know the footprint of a product -- not merely the carbon footprint -- but the full enviro-footprint of every stage from extraction of materials, to converging of materials to production to packaging to shipping through use and disposal for every component of every product (at least for mass produced products) than consumers will begin choosing the better choices from an environmental perspective.

To "refresh your recollection" (I am a former lawyer, after all), let me take you back. Good Guide is a beta site that rates products on three scales: environmental, nutritional, and social justice (my terms, not theirs). They reduce a product and its producer to three numerical scores, with 10 being the top score. Then they combine the three scores to a single score purporting to rate a product/producer overall. More than a month ago, I wrote to Good Guide through its website asking for help in understanding how it could rate a commercial "lite" yogurt (Yoplait) with all its additives, so much higher than an organic, plain whole milk (Straus) made from nothing more than organic whole milk and live yogurt cultures, and higher than an organic nonfat plain (Nancy's) made from nothing more than organic nonfat milk and live yogurt cultures.