No one would buy a product with a label reading "Made with Forced Labor" or
"Waste from This Product Contaminates Town's Main Water Source.” And yet, many
products purchased today have egregious human and environmental
costs
hidden along their supply chains. A new, ethical e-commerce platform is on a
mission to bring transparency to consumer goods products.
Neuterra decodes the societal and environmental impacts
of global supply chains and shares those insights with consumers. The platform
enables consumers to make data-driven purchasing decisions and helps brands gain
valuable consumer insights on sustainability trends, all with the goal of
revealing the true cost of consumption and making transparency the norm.
The company scrutinizes its vetted brands’ supply chains through a proprietary
life cycle analysis (LCA), which assesses social and environmental impacts
across five key production pillars:
1. Material extraction
2. Manufacturing
3. Packaging and transportation
4. Consumer use
5. End of life
Neuterra integrates the tried-and-true aspects of e-commerce with a new paradigm
of ethical consumption. It will feature curated brands with high supply chain
visibility. Easily digestible infographics illustrate the true cost of
consumption, and artificial intelligence empowers consumers to shop their
personalized values (working conditions, BIPOC representation, gender equality,
etc). When viewing an item, the product’s supply chain story will be displayed
to give shoppers a full view of who created it and how.
“We want to re-imagine consumption on a planet that has finite resources, and we
want to choose to imagine a climate-safe future that is equitable, habitable,
and in which everyone can thrive,” said Neuterra founder Fatimah Walee told
Sustainable Brands™.
Sixty
percent
of global greenhouse gas emissions result from consumer products’ supply chains.
Neuterra is starting in fashion, which alone contributes to 10
percent
of global GHG emissions. The organization will compare its brands’ holistic
supply chain
outlook
to a
fast-fashion
baseline; as the platform evolves, it will add other consumer goods categories.
Neuterra seeks to enact systems change through consumer education and
transparency incentivization. Unlike other “education” platforms that shift the
burden of action on
consumers,
Neuterra will work to connect brands that are actively seeking supply chain
transparency to consumers that want to support them, fostering a culture of
corporate accountability.
“We want to take the burden of combating
greenwashing
from consumers and put that back on businesses and brands, because they’re the
ones responsible for their own carbon emissions and how they treat their
workers,” Walee said.
In Walee’s opinion, current mass production models are incongruous with holistic
sustainability. Neuterra and its partners are imagining a new paradigm of small
batch production, thereby reducing excess emissions and waste associated with
mass production.
“You can’t have a company built on exploiting natural resources and then claim
that you’re sustainable at one stage in your supply chain,” Walee said. “It just
doesn’t work that way. We’re taking a holistic approach — looking not just at
brands’ in-house operations, but their entire supply chains.”
Caste discrimination + racism = climate crisis
According to Walee, capitalism is the benefactor of institutionalized
racism
— where exploitation and colonization were not only considered moral, but a
necessity for advancing civilization. Externalities were swept under the rug of
the margins; and the climate crisis has now emerged from the margins with a
vengeance.
“The quicker folks realize the reason we’re facing the current climate crisis is
because of racism and caste discrimination, the quicker we can actually do
something about it,” Walee said.
As a Black-owned, Muslim-owned, woman-owned business, Neuterra recognizes the
relationship between harm to people and harm to the planet. It’s Walee’s belief
that justice for one can’t be realized without seeking justice for both
simultaneously.
“There’s a correlation between how a company’s workers are
treated
and the company’s environmental impact,” she said. “Companies have to extract
themselves from these abusive partnerships in their supply chains, and they have
to do it when they identify them.”
This is where Neuterra comes in: It empowers companies to audit supply chains,
identify forced labor
risks,
and take immediate action once injustice is exposed — then, relay that
information to consumers.
Hidden externalities keep people from developing knowledge and connection with a
company or product; transparency fosters empathy and connection to the people
and planet that produce our goods, Walee said.
Dismantling oppressive consumption
For Walee, intersectional environmentalism is everything: Social justice is
part-and-parcel with decarbonization; because as long as there are people and
places at the margins, society will dump planet- and people-killing
externalities there.
Environmentalists won’t hesitate to connect the disappearance of endangered
species with climate change; but they usually fail to recognize the correlation
between a warming planet and what author Leah
Thomas
calls “endangered humans.”
“We need everyone on board to address this issue,” Walee said. “And a lot of
the solutions currently
exist;
they don’t require new technologies. They just require us to listen to folks
that don’t necessarily have the spotlight.”
Neuterra isn’t in it to remake the wheel, but to bring together siloed actors
with big solutions. Neuterra has a “both/and” approach, utilizing in-house
solutions and partner assets to create bespoke transparency frameworks for each
individual brand partner.
In addition to strategic partnerships, Neuterra utilizes tech solutions such as
radio frequency
ID
and blockchain to help companies digitize supply chain assets in a permanent
digital record from sourcing to delivery, wrapping it all up in an easily
digested interface to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions.
“The number one thing for us to do is showcase all of our findings to consumers,
because we need brands that are bold and smart enough to see the end goal,”
Walee said.
She sees Neuterra as a part of a foundation for a new economy — one centered on
radical transparency, egalitarianism and addressing the climate crisis with an
intersectional lens.
“We’re in a battle of imaginations,” Walee said. “Whose imaginations do we want
to live in the future?”
Neuterra is raising capital to help
five onboarded businesses bring transparency to their supply chains and scale
the Neuterra platform for full public launch in 2023.
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Christian is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and outdoor junkie obsessed with the intersectionality between people and planet. He partners with brands and organizations with social and environmental impact at their core, assisting them in telling stories that change the world.
Published Jul 7, 2022 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST