I've not had much of a chance to use it yet, but flicking through I found this, which I found very interesting.
"Ethical consumerism is just as much about supporting the 'good' companies and products as it is withdrawing our support from the 'bad' ones."
Their four types of Ethical Consumerism are listed as:
"Positive Buying
This means favouring particular ethical products, such as energy saving lightbulbs.
Negative PurchasingThis means avoiding products that you disapprove of, such as battery eggs or gas-guzzling cars.
Company-Based Purchasing
This means targeting a business as a whole and avoiding all the products made by one company. For example, the Nestle boycott has targeted all its brands and subsidiaries in a bid to get the company to change the way it markets its baby milk formula across the world.
Fully-Screened Approach
This means looking both at companies and at products and evaluating which product is the most ethical overall."
"Positive Buying
This means favouring particular ethical products, such as energy saving lightbulbs.
Negative PurchasingThis means avoiding products that you disapprove of, such as battery eggs or gas-guzzling cars.
Company-Based Purchasing
This means targeting a business as a whole and avoiding all the products made by one company. For example, the Nestle boycott has targeted all its brands and subsidiaries in a bid to get the company to change the way it markets its baby milk formula across the world.
Fully-Screened Approach
This means looking both at companies and at products and evaluating which product is the most ethical overall."
I definitely agree with the idea that our buying decisions have the power of both positive and negative purchasing, and it's interesting to see this spelled out. I think for me, the decisions of where I choose to not buy from are going to be as interesting as where I choose to buy from.
Hi Steph,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting post. I have had many a dilemma over where to buy 'ethical' products from over the years. To be honest it is getting easier as the world becomes 'greener', but one of my biggest dilemmas was banking and insurance products. How do you find ethical car insurance for example? Years ago the only one on offer that was remotely 'ethical' was the Coop and they offered a car insurance that offset a percentage of your car's emissions. However, at that time I was also dithering over the 'benefit' of carbon offset schemes. So I got stuck in a bit of a stalemate. However, I decided that it was the *best* option at the time. Coop now have (almost) all of my insurance covered - apart from business (which is another can of worms).
Anyway, my point being that sometimes even the 'ethical' options that present themselves they may still not *really* be what you would ideally want, in which case you then have to weigh up the pros and cons of these too (and you will ALWAYS get someone that will tell you that you should have gone for the *other* option). Sheesh.
Paula x
Yeah. It's such a minefield. I think I'm going to end up doing a lot of reading and discussing, then just making the best decision I can (which may end up being the least bad option...)
ReplyDelete