At the ILF we came across this article on ethical shopping by Chris Jensen, founder of Good For US. We agree, that ethical shopping needs to become a mainstream movement and therefore are delighted to share his article with our wider ILF community.
Ethical shopping is one of those ideas that seem so obvious in hindsight.
Good For Us founder Chris Jensen calls for innovative ways to make ethical shopping – buying from brands that do right – more widely and easily accessible. In his article published in Eco Business, he states that to comply with ethical friendly standards such as achieving a zero carbon footprint is still not an option for most large organisations as they are not able to compete with competitors that have less ambitious goals.
Time and time again when key issues are on the line, the trendy, the convenient and the cheap have taken precedence.
Chris Jensen highlights that ethical shopping needs to enter the mainstream and overcome the lack of the critical mass of consumers that want to make a meaningful impact on the environment through their purchasing behaviour.
If corporations are the only ones that can save us, then ethical shoppers are the only ones that can convince them to do so.
While there are simple ways to find out what companies are up to by looking up websites that provide ratings and information such as, Good Guide, Ethical Consumer and CSRHub, those websites lack to solve the problem. In his view ethical shopping will only succeed, if it moves beyond being an awkward afterthought to being an integral part of our shopping experience; It must change from being a depressing topic of conversation to something we delight in sharing with our friends.
Original article published on Eco Business on the 7th of August 2014 by Chris Jensen. Read the full article here.