Ethical Consumer

One of my favourite Christmas presents was from my sister, who bought me a subscription to Ethical Consumer. My old housemate used to get the magazines, but the subscription now includes access to the online resource too, which is likely to be much more useful for me.

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."

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. 

Values...

When I started to think about doing this project, I sat in a cafe with one of my friends. He is a committed vegan, and I am a happy meat eater. We discussed for a long time about what influences a decision regarding a consumer purchase and decided it came down to a set of values, such as

· Environmental impact

· Financial cost

· Comfort/wellbeing/health

· Global impact

· Ethical impact

· Independently owned

· Locality

· Hassle/ease

· Quality

And the key to this is working out where your priorities lie. For some purchases, the ethical impact of your purchase might be key. For others, it might be far more about sourcing something locally, or investing in a quality item. Everyone will weight these values differently and so the choices we all make will be different. So I may well refer to this list as I go through the list (and even expand and add to the list)...