akaryon | project futuro-prices


futuro - calculation of "sustainable prices“ for products

project \| futuro prices \| futuro game \| knowledge transfer \| future perspectives

The project

uturo was initiated in January 2002 from SOL (Menschen für Solidarität, Ökologie und Lebensstil - People for Solidarity, Ecology and Lifestyle) in co-operation with 'Klimabündnis Austria' and akaryon. Additional support comes from many NGOs (ARGE Weltläden, Südwind, TransFair) and experts of austrian universities (WU Wien, BOKU Wien, Montanuniversität Leoben, Karl Franzens Universität Graz).

Motivation

Individuals get more and more concerned about quality of goods (especially food) and services, but they have little means by which to judge the ecological and social impact of production, transport, use and disposal of goods and services. There are some established eco-labels, for example the Austrian “Umweltzeichen”, that signify some goods as “better” than others. But they don’t answer questions like “how much better”, which would allow for price-like comparisons – a well-established habit in shopping.

Objectives

The project futuro aims to label goods with their “true” (sustainable) prices. These sustainable prices should be able to reflect the scope of sustainability (i.e. social and ecological) and to allow for comparisons between different types of products (where eco-labels only provide a sort of ranking of products of the same type from different producers). In this sense the sustainable prices are meant to build an orientation guide for consumers.

History

In 2001 a research was carried out to find out about similar initiatives.
In 2002 participative steps to determine the sustainability criteria to be included in the sustainable price were taken.
In 2003, in co-operation with scientists, the calculation methods were finished and applied and demonstrated on first products: apple- and orange-juice.
In 2004 T-Shirts were under evaluation.
Another track of the project was to invent a 'futuro-game' or other sustainability games, which help people to deal with the topic. For both topics (futuro prices and futuro game) the team set up some workshops, which are still to be booked.
In 2005 futuro shall be detailed as a research project.
Additionally we outlined the project 'cleanEuro' to reach a greater audience. Start for this project is planned for summer 2005.

project coordinator: akaryon

akaryon is coordinating the project in teamwork with project leader Dan Jakubowicz from SOL/FG-SOL.
We did most preparatory work (proposals, research, ...) and organized all project steps so far.
akaryon also developed and realized the project website, which contains a public and a login-section. In this login-section participants can post their ideas, questions and contributions. The website ist connected with a database.



to futuro website ...