Keep an eye on myEcoCost

Project leader Rob Mostyn writes:

"We are now 7 months into the myEcoCost project. It has been quite challenging building up a momentum and aligning the thoughts of so many contributors but the progress we are making is sound and I am very pleased with the foundation work.

We have an official website now, we have completed our requirements gathering and the system architecture is starting to take very good shape. We are also starting to write papers for academic conferences later in the year.

Several weeks ago one consortium partner addressed a cleaning industry conference. The topic was about the 200 or so eco labels in use around the world and the challenge consumers face in making sense of it all. In brief he said "it isn't going to work". He went on to mention his involvement in myEcoCost and some of the big industry players expressed an immediate interest in the idea. So word is starting to get around.

It would be wrong to think of this as "our" project. With the Commission's financial support it is now a European project and I would like to express my gratitude once again to the Commission and its reviewers who rated our application so highly.

Here is an overall summary of what the project is up to:
*  The theme of the EU Commission's funding call was "Innovative resource efficient technologies, processes and services".
*  The tag line for the project is "Forming the nucleus of a novel ecological accounting system".
*  The ultimate objective of the concept is to inform individual consumers on a day-by-day basis whether they are living sustainably or not, with the intent that people will modify their consumption in order to lead one planet lifestyles.

We believe this is the beginning of society finding its way to living sustainably and ensuring there is a habitable planet for us in 500 years time. Thank you so much for your interest in it to date.

And now I have a favour to ask.

The best way to keep informed is to receive our project newsletter and so I would like to invite you to register on the website to receive it. This will keep you abreast of the achievement of the project in a more timely fashion, with a newsletter being sent every 2 months or so. It will always be brief and to the point and there is no risk of email addresses being passed on to third parties. If you go to www.myecocost.eu (drop the "www." if you are on a Mac using Safari) and then click on "subscribe" in the lower right corner of the window underneath Project Newsletter. And in case you don.t want to register for yourself. you could do it for us! The more people registering for the newsletter has our dissemination statistics look that much better. ;-)"