Social & Environmental
Impact Scoring
Social and environmental impact are one picture, not two. Below are the two tools built to prove it: a nine-category score that shows the whole of a company's impact, and an ecosystem map that shows how every piece connects.
Est. 2015 · Rebuilding for its next chapterThe Score
Nine categories. One whole picture.
Every company is scored on a 100-point scale across nine impact categories, built from owner interviews, site visits, and operational data. No single category tells the story — labor practices, energy use, community relationships, and waste streams are all pieces of the same picture, which is why the score holds them together instead of ranking them apart. Explore each category below.
Tap or hover a segment to explore
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Safe, healthy conditions for the people doing the work — and safe products for the people who use them.
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How much energy an operation uses, where that energy comes from, and the emissions and climate impact that follow.
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Wages, benefits, scheduling, and how workers are treated. When companies pay poverty wages, it impacts whole communities.
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How a business shows up for the neighborhoods where it operates — whether it respects, listens to, and invests in the people around it.
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How a company behaves within its own industry — transparency, cooperation, and whether it raises the bar or races to the bottom.
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Packaging and waste streams — what ends up in a landfill, or worse, in the surrounding ecosystem.
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How much water an operation draws from shared supplies, and what condition it's in when it returns.
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Equity and restorative justice — who bore the costs of an industry's past, who profits from it now, and what a company does about that gap.
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The chemicals, pesticides, and materials that go into making a product — and their effects on workers, consumers, and surrounding land and water.
Ahead of its time, literally: this scoring framework was built independently in 2015 — and closely anticipated what is now formally known as True Cost Accounting, the approach since adopted by the FAO, the UN, and the European Commission.
Understanding the Impact
Everything is connected
The nine categories above aren't separate problems — they're one system. Use the interactive map below to learn how the choices businesses make are connected to the health and wellbeing of our environment and communities, what makes up Just Good Score, and why these things matter.
Explore the ecosystem
Tap or click any pin on the map to learn how that piece connects to the whole — and to your Just Good Score.
The Scorecard
What a score looks like
Every scored company receives a public scorecard: one headline number, built from all nine categories, with the reasoning shown for each. Here's an illustrative example for an everyday product — a gallon of milk from a mid-sized creamery.
Meadowlane Creamery
Dairy producer · Illustrative example — not a scored company
Strong safety protocols, ergonomic equipment, and paid safety training for all farm and plant staff.
Rooftop solar covers a third of processing energy; refrigeration upgraded — delivery fleet still runs on diesel.
Starting wage above the county living wage, healthcare at 90 days, and consistent scheduling year-round.
Hires locally, supplies the regional food bank at cost, and opens the farm for school visits.
Active in the regional dairy cooperative and shares pasture-management practices with neighboring farms.
Returnable glass bottle program in local stores; plastic jugs remain for wholesale, and whey byproduct is only partially reused.
Drip irrigation on feed crops and planted runoff buffers along the creek; groundwater draw still above regional average.
Profit-sharing for year-round staff and a second-chance hiring program in partnership with a local reentry organization.
No synthetic pesticides on feed crops, non-GMO feed, and no routine antibiotic use in the herd.
Why
The cost that never makes it to the price tag
Almost everything for sale carries costs that never show up at checkout: the energy burned to make it, the water drawn to grow or process it, the chemicals released into surrounding land and water, the packaging that outlives the product by centuries — and the wages and working conditions of the people who made it.
Within any industry, there is a vast difference in the social and environmental performance of individual companies — but consumers, communities, and governments have little or no way to see it. Just Good Score exists to make that difference visible: detailed, comparable information about what a business actually does, paired with education on why these things matter and how they connect.
How It Works
Two tools, one platform
Just Good Score is more than a rating. It's a platform for shifting whole markets — pairing hard scoring data with a governance system that puts communities in the driver's seat.
The Scoring System
A comprehensive social and environmental score that gives governments and institutions a basis for real decisions — tax treatment, subsidies, procurement — grounded in a business's measured impact, not its marketing.
Community Governance
A stakeholder-driven system that lets the communities living alongside these businesses weight the scoring criteria themselves — deciding locally what matters most, rather than having it decided for them.
Origin
Designed for every industry. Proven in one.
Conceived
The core idea takes shape: make the hidden social and environmental costs of business visible, comparable, and actionable.
Built & piloted
The full framework is designed and proven in Washington State's newest, fastest-forming market — where early business owners were unusually willing to open their books, and where scoring could shape practices while the industry was still taking form. Eleven companies scored across all nine categories, with individual public scorecards and a working scoring API.
Next chapter
Repositioned as an industry-agnostic platform for government, institutional, and community partners — anywhere.
Why Now
The world caught up. The tool is still missing.
When this framework was built in 2015, pricing the hidden costs of business was a fringe idea. In 2026, it's global policy consensus — and the field is moving from measuring those costs to acting on them. What's still missing is the implementation layer.
$12T
Hidden costs, every year
The UN FAO now estimates the hidden social, environmental, and health costs of global agrifood systems alone at roughly $12 trillion per year — nearly 10% of global GDP — and has concluded that True Cost Accounting should become the norm for decision-makers.
2022–26
Research phase: complete
The EU's flagship True Cost Accounting research project — FOODCoST, funded under Horizon Europe — concluded in 2026, delivering open externality-cost databases and policy frameworks, and closing with one question: what comes next?
2015
The missing layer, already built
Corporate ESG scoring serves investors at enterprise prices, with no community voice. Academic TCA work stops at the report. The government-ready, community-weighted implementation platform is the missing piece — and it's the one Just Good Score built first.
Right Now
Still here. Still building.
Just Good Score is between chapters — the framework is proven, the policy world has caught up, and the next phase is bringing it to new partners and new industries. We're actively exploring paths forward, from a local government pilot to academic research partnerships. If you're with a government agency, a university, a community organization, or a research institution thinking about accountability tools, let's talk.
info@justgoodscore.com