Building further on improvements made in the second version of the UP Scorecard launched in February 2022, today we are excited to share that a new and improved third version has been released. What’s new in this version? When comparing foodware and packaging products, you can now calculate regionalized impact scores specific to Europe as well as scores based on a global average. This is in addition to calculating impacts specific to the United States, which is a feature that remains available. Importantly, this new version also allows users to create and score fully customizable packaging products based on a wide range of commonly used food contact material types. A simplification and fresh re-design of the results page also make comparing products across the six impact areas even easier.
Although this latest release is still in a beta stage (v0.3), the UP Scorecard has been significantly expanded and improved. It makes the UP Scorecard far more robust, accurate, and customizable than ever before to help companies improve decision-making and reach their targets. A summary of the biggest new features and improvements made include:
- Regionalized scoring with Europe as a new region: Additional geographic regions can now be implemented in the backend of the tool (if the necessary data is available). The two new regions “Europe average” and “World average” have been added (in addition to the already existing “United States average” region) and can be selected by the user for the assessment.
- Option to create new and customized products: An additional function for creating new products was implemented. It allows the user to create new products based on the commonly used materials already available in the tool.
- Streamlined scoring: The normalization for all six metrics has been harmonized to make comparing results simpler. For the normalization, the best possible product (i.e. a product without impacts) is now used as a reference point for all scores. The scale for all normalized scores has been updated to always be from 1 (worst score) to 100 (best score).
- Redesign of landing and results pages: The landing page and results page have been redesigned and updated. The presentation of the product scores on the results page has been adapted and simplified to make it more intuitive. Normalized scores are now shown as numerical values (and still with an easy-to-understand color scale). This makes the scores directly comparable between the different metrics.
- Simplified instructions and background material: Guidance within the tool has been adapted and/or supplemented in order to simplify instructions and helpful background information.
- Metric units as default: To make the UP Scorecard easily usable globally and to simplify comparisons, all units have been changed to standard metric units across the tool, including in product descriptions.
For a more detailed overview of these and other new features and changes, see the UP Scorecard’s change log. Do you have questions about how the UP Scorecard works or how it could help you? Be sure to take a look at the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. An updated version of the methodology document has also been released that explains in detail all of the data sources and calculations used to calculate each score.
The SUM’D team would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who shared feedback with us when developing this new version of the UP Scorecard. Many of the received suggestions have already been incorporated, and there are still others we are working to take on board in future versions. If you have any feedback to share on this new version, please do so using this online form.
We are excited to share this new version with you and hope you enjoy using it!
