Sourcemap is a social network where anyone can contribute to the story behind products. It can basically be used as a tool for assessing the lifecycle of a product, whether you’re a business and want to ensure your supply chain is efficient, or a consumer with ethical concerns. You can simulate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using and throwing away products using the site’s Life-Cycle Assessment calculator, which uses linked geographic and geological data. Take the lifecycle of the average laptop, some of the parts included are tin from Indonesia, copper from Chile, and silicon from Sao Paolo. Sourcemap tells you how much CO2 is used throughout the whole process. The creators hope that Sourcemap will be used to help market social and environmental products and to buy carbon offsets. Supply chains published on the site can be embedded into websites, printed on packaging, or linked through QR codes. In the future, we think that brands will automatically register their goods on the Sourcemap database (and site’s like it), as transparency and traceability becomes default brand behaviour.


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Thanks to Neil Bennett for this story. Neil is anticipating an amazing but crazy 48 hours in Bangkok.

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