Method & disclaimer

How a verdict is reached

Each label is our assessment of a company's own published sustainability report, measured against the fixed rubric below. It is an opinion grounded in stated criteria — the spirit of a Consumer Reports or Wired verdict — not a factual accusation that a company is lying or greenwashing. The tells describe characteristics of a report, not the motives of the people who wrote it.

Every finding on a verdict page either quotes the report verbatim — checked character-for-character against the source text before it is published — or names a specific, defined omission. We never paraphrase a claim into something the company did not write.

What the labels mean

Recommended means “no major greenwashing tells found in this report.” It is not an endorsement of the company, its products, or its overall environmental record.
Improving means some tells are present, but not enough to reach Not Recommended.
Not Recommended means multiple major tells are present in the report.
insufficient-data reports are never published — a report we could not read or that was too thin to judge is not quietly labeled Recommended.

The tells

Each tell is defined so two people applying it to the same report reach the same finding. Major tells drive the label; minor tells alone can never reach Not Recommended.

Tell	Severity	What it means
Unbaselined headline claim	major	A reduction or improvement claim with no baseline value and no baseline year — progress you can't measure against a starting point.
Missing or unquantified Scope 3	major	Scope 1/2 emissions are disclosed but Scope 3 (usually the majority of the real footprint) is absent or given no number.
Offset-dependent neutrality	major	A 'carbon neutral' / 'net zero today' claim achieved mostly through purchased offsets rather than actual emissions cuts.
Long-dated target, no interim milestones	minor	A far-off target (e.g. net-zero 2050) with no nearer interim milestone and no stated path to get there.
Vague superlative, no number	minor	Qualitative bragging — 'industry-leading', 'world-class' — standing in for any measurable performance figure.

Defined but not yet applied: Goalpost shifting — coming in a later release.

How the label is decided

The label is a function of tell severity, not the raw count.

Label	Rule
Not Recommended	2 or more Major tells.
Improving	Exactly 1 Major tell, or 2+ Minor tells with no Major.
Recommended	0 Major tells and at most 1 Minor tell.
insufficient-data	Extraction failed, report too thin to assess, or all quotes dropped by the verbatim-quote gate. Never collapses to Recommended.

Disclaimer

This site analyzes publicly available reports for editorial and educational purposes. Labels reflect our reading of those documents against the criteria above and may not reflect a company's full environmental performance, subsequent disclosures, or context outside the analyzed report. Company names and report titles belong to their respective owners. The source is cited on every verdict page — if you believe a verdict misreads a report, we welcome corrections.

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