How does Greener work?

Algorithmic matchmaking

The Greener team has spent years exploring how to help make sustainability easier for small businesses. We've researched a wide range of solutions; from carbon offsetting, to consulting, to environmental analytics. However we kept coming to the same conclusion – these solutions are either too expensive, too complicated, or too time consuming to really be impactful for SMEs.

So we took a step back to think about the core sustainability problems facing SMEs. Fundamentally, sustainability is about working with the right partners, and looking at wider supply chains. At the moment finding well suited sustainability partners can be a time-consuming process, time which small businesses owners would rather spend running their businesses. It can also require extensive research and expertise, and can even cost significant amounts of money (attending events, speaking to advisors, etc).

On the other side of the coin, there are a lot of interesting businesses who have developed innovative sustainability-focused products or services, but it can often be challenging for them to get their products seen by their ideal users. This is especially true when their products are genuinely new to the market, and are not widely understood.

That's how we came up with algorithmic matchmaking. By allowing small businesses to easily and intuitively discover, consider, and contact one another, we can dramatically simplify the process of building sustainable partnerships and supply chains. Through this matchmaking we can make it easy for businesses to start building sustainable supply chains.

And so Greener was born!

How does the algorithm work?

We can't take you fully under the hood of our algorithm, but we can say that we factor in a wide range of variables. Those range from an organisation's supply chain location, to more qualitative factors that could influence the potential quality of any partnership.

As part of our R&D stage, we compared matches generated by our algorithm with matches hand-crafted by our sustainability experts and found an incredibly high accuracy of over 94%.

But we aren't satisfied yet! We are constantly honing and refining our algorithm in order to make sure that our users receive the best possible matches. We want our users to find perfectly suited business partners, all delivered straight to their dashboard, without any time or energy wasted.

Our approach to sustainability

When it comes to sustainability a lot of companies focus on single data points. Carbon emissions, energy usage, amount of waste, etc. Greener takes a systems-thinking approach to sustainability, with a particular emphasis on networks and the interactions between businesses.

You can read our in-depth sustainability thesis here!