Isra-Mart srl : E-market shows buyers carbon footprint of goods

www.isra-mart.com

Isra-Mart srl news:

An online procurement market, which enables buyers to see a calculation of the carbon footprint of the products they are buying, will be officially launched by Richard Benyon, minister for natural environment and fisheries on 7 October 2010.

The e-market, @UK PLC is already active and has accumulated over 1 million users to date.

The carbon footprint of products available on the site is calculated using e2class, @UKPLC’s ethical and environmental classification system, which combines data from the Stockholm Environment Institute and the Centre for Sustainable Accounting with the e-market’s own GreenInsight artificial intelligence tools.

The site was originally announced at the Business of Bio-Diversity Summit on 14 July this year and will also allow buyers to buy carbon off-sets for their purchases.

Since then @UK PLC has made significant changes to its business model ready for the launch, promoting its suppliers to the wider internet in an open format. Previously the 3 million products available on the @UK PLC e-procurement platform have only been available to a limited number of buying organisations and through search engine promotion of the individual supplier sites.

The site has proved popular with UK public sector organisations: Duncan says almost every one of the largest 5,000 public sector organisations purchases through the site. He hopes to recruit the UK’s 25,000 schools to site too, as well as many more private sector organisations.

Google is also supporting next month’s launch with a promotion to the site’s customers of an in-kind value of £10m, to encourage customers to increase their Google-based advertising and traffic through the site.