True Price (Winkel)

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True Price™ is a non-profit organization that helps front-running companies uncover social and ecological costs. The services that True Price™ offers resonate with the movement towards a transparent, inclusive and future-proof economy. Aim is to make products with close-to-zero ecological and social costs mainstream.

Ecological and social costs
Every product has hidden ecological and social costs, which are incurred in production, sales and consumption. The most important ecological costs are climate change due to emissions, biodiversity loss, land and water use, depletion of minerals and other materials, and pollution and waste. On the social side, we need to consider underpayment, indecent labor conditions, health risks on the job, insurance gaps, impact on local communities and health effects on consumers.

These costs are currently unpaid for in the shop, but society and the planet as a whole definitely pay the price. We want to find ways to bring that price down.

Approach
We are working together with a diversity of partners to (i) develop and test a valuation method for uncovering social and ecological costs, (ii) assist companies to calculate and show their social and ecological costs, and (iii) engage and inform citizens.

Team
True Price™’s executive team is made up of talented professionals with diverse experience and expertise. Our board consists of Herman Mulder (Chair Global Reporting Initiative), André Veneman (Sustainability Director AkzoNobel), Hans Eenhoorn (former SVP Unilever), Fokko Wientjes (Director Corporate Sustainable Development DSM), Charles Evers (former VP Finance and Supply Management Unilever) Zita Schellekens (PR at HEINEKEN) and Jasper de Jong (corporate lawyer at Allen & Overy).

Our valued advisory board includes Feike Sijbesma (CEO at DSM), Ton Büchner (CEO at Akzo Nobel) Pavan Sukhdev (Study Leader at TEEB), Peter Bakker (President at WBCSD), Solitaire Townsend (Co-founder at Futerra), Herman Wijffels (Professor at University of Utrecht) and Alexander Rinnooy Kan (Professor at University of Amsterdam).

Partners
We closely work with organizations from a range of sectors. Our current partners are AkzoNobel, CNV International, DSM, IDH, FMO, NCDO, Rabobank, the Oxfam Novib Grow Campaign, the Teeb-for-Business coalition, Triodos Foundation and Worldconnectors.

The finish line
What we want, in the end, is to know the ‘true’ price of each product and service. That way, we can make decisions that ensure our production and consumption create value for our planet and society. Either by preventing (e.g. protect a forest) or by restoring social and ecological costs (e.g. rebuild a forest). But for this to happen, we first need to make these costs visible on a large scale.

http://thetrueprice.org/