Permafrost

Footprint products quickly, avoid “greenwashing”, check suppliers and engage your colleagues.

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Permafrost is a web and mobile application for environmentally sustainable purchasing and procurement.

Finding data on the environmental impacts of products and their suppliers is time consuming. Even the most careful run the risk being misled about the true impact of what they buy, often because both the supplier and purchaser lack a clear framework to navigate the trade-offs involved sustainable purchasing. Furthermore, once research has been done, purchasing guidelines and recommendations need to be shared with other decision makers, who need concrete and specific information to weigh against other criteria, such as price, availability and function.

Permafrost reduces the time it takes to research a purchase while simultaneously reducing the risk of supplier greenwashing. It provides a robust, quantitative framework1 for evaluating products across their lifecycles, including:

  • Efficiency
  • Sourcing materials
  • Waste and recycling
  • Phase-out of toxic chemicals
  • Product take-back programs
  • Obsolescence
  • Sustainable design

Organisational adoption and acceptance is often the greatest challenge in sustainable purchasing. Permafrost is a simple yet powerful communication tool for engaging and informing others. It boils quantitatively robust analyses into summaries that provide decision makers what they need to know in a pragmatic, actionable format.

Permafrost helps organisations purchase better than “business as usual”, which makes a significant contribution to reaching efficiency, waste and climate change targets.

1 The framework is based on the Permadata web service, which aggregates data from EPEAT, Energy Star, CDP and other sources. Technically, it is an ensemble of frameworks, which are better taken together.