What’s Practically Green?

Practically Green is an online service that helps busy people make smart, practical, eco-friendly decisions for themselves and their families. We start with a dynamic assessment tool — the Quiz — that delivers a customized, manageable plan of next steps for healthy green living. We also offer expert advice, scientifically accurate information, and real-world, friend-to-friend recommendations for hundreds of things you can do. We want to make green living easier and enjoyable, and to remove some of the guilt, confusion, and cost that can arise.

What can you help me with?

First, Practically Green helps you to figure out where you are on the spectrum of green living by assessing your lifestyle with a green quiz. You are then given a score, which you can improve by committing to any of our 400+ actions. Next, create an action plan to help keep you on track with your healthier, greener choices. Finally, you are able to celebrate and share your achievements with friends and family through Facebook, inspiring yourself and others to continue to pursue a greener future!

So, how does it work?

Practically Green pulls together trusted, scientifically based information on hundreds of things you can do to be greener, why that action is green, as well as useful links and how-to’s. We’ve also created a proprietary points system for actions to make it easier to understand whether it’s a high-impact thing or a low-impact thing. Based on your profile, we then create a personalized set of recommendations of more things you can do to be greener, improve your action plan, and earn specific awards and badges!

Why is it reliable?

We know that there is a difference between something that seems like a great idea and something that IS a great idea. We pull together opinions from people who have taken each action. Was it easy or hard? Did it cost a lot or save a lot? What product or service did they use? Did they like that product or not? Would they recommend the action? Would they recommend the product? Friends can also recommend actions to a friend, which helps ensure you are getting the best green ideas from everyone.

What makes Practically Green unique?

• Our assessment tool focuses on the quantity and intensity of actions in four areas of green living, along with a few facts about their life, to segment people into one of ten green profiles
• Our proprietary recommendation engine provides people with a customized, manageable list of things they may want to do next to help improve
• Our proprietary points system translates complex science about impact into something real people can understand. 150 points = big impact. 5 points = small impact.
• Our actions database pulls together expert and real-life data, all in one place, to help people make decisions to change. In addition to why it’s green and how to do it, what products and services are really green and do people like? This helps protect people from greenwashing and bad experiences, by directing them to companies with good green products and services.
• Our integration with Facebook & Twitter makes the process a whole lot more interesting and research shows that when friends make recommendations, people are more likely to do things

We think by doing all this that we are going to make green living easier and more enjoyable for the millions of people who want to be greener as well as the companies who are trying to reach them.