Ethical Shopping for Beginners

Donna:             A great big empire built on slavery.

The Doctor:     It’s not so different from your time.

Donna:             Oi, I haven’t got slaves.

The Doctor:     Who do you think made your clothes?¹

Doctor Who S4 E3, ‘Planet of the Ood’ (2008)

 

Behold my great and numerous purchases, she exhorts.

If you read my last ethical-shopping-themed post,² you might be forgiven for supposing me to be done with the preamble on that topic now. Not quite, I’m afraid. Three principles and three caveats strike me as necessary to outline before I proceed with the business of specific, practical recommendations; I’ll attempt to keep them brief.

For all I’ve been talking about ‘ethical shopping’ as if it’s obvious which concerns that entails, there are all sorts of competing factors that might lead a person to consider one purchase more ethically sound than another. These, I suggest, can be broadly categorised under the pleasingly (or possibly a tad cringingly) alliterative headlines of Product, People, and Planet.

Under Product, one considers questions like: do I actually need this? Could I borrow one for the duration I need it, or use something slightly different that I already own? Do I actually even want this, if I give myself a bit of cooling-off time after initially catching sight of it? Will I use it? Will I use it regularly? Will it fulfil the functions I want of it, or will I find myself buying a whole catalogue of other paraphernalia to supplement its capabilities? Is it good quality? Will it last me a long time? Is it repairable? Is it repairable in an actually meaningful way (because let’s be real here, I’m no handyman)? In short, is this something it’s actually worth my buying?

Under People, one considers questions like: were the people who made this paid fairly? Did they have good working conditions to make it in? What about the people who produced the raw materials it’s made from – be they farmed, mined, whatever? And as concerns the people to whom I’m actually handing over my cash, do I believe it’ll do more good in their hands than it would elsewhere? Whose pockets am I really lining here?

Under Planet, one considers questions like: is this made of sustainable materials? Is it second-hand, or recycled? What was the extent of the environmental damage caused by the relevant manufacturing processes? How far has it had to be transported? When I’m finished with it, will I be able to dispose of it in a sustainable way – recycling or composting, most likely? What about the packaging?

It should be pretty self-evident that often, such concerns are going to conflict with one another, hence my first caveat: there is no such thing as a perfect ethical purchase. I once perused a copy of The Rough Guide to Ethical Shopping in my secondary school library, and was struck by the author’s suggestion that if one were to try to live one’s life without having any negative impact on the world whatsoever, one would be forced to conclude that one really ought to reduce one’s carbon dioxide output to zero by ceasing to breathe.³ And indeed, there is a sense in which all of us as humans would be doing the world a favour were we to simply stop existing, but, oddly enough, that wasn’t God’s favoured solution to the problem of our sinfulness.⁴ In the way we spend our money as in all areas of our conduct, we’re never going to hit perfection this side of the consummation of the age, but we can still strive not to grow weary of doing good to all people.⁵ And in the way we spend our money as in all areas of our conduct, that’s often going to involve selecting a course of actions on the grounds not that it’s ideal, but rather that it’s overall less terrible than the other possibilities. Each of us has to make decisions about his or her own priorities. So I might choose, for example, to compromise on ecological issues of packaging and transport in order to get hold of a product made by a workers’ co-operative changing lives for the better on the other side of the world. Or I might choose to sacrifice almost all concerns about the relevant manufacturing process in order to acquire an item that’s actually going to function as I need it to for a good length of time, saving me from having to make numerous other dubious purchases to supplement it.

And sometimes, realistically, I am going to end up sacrificing pretty much all concerns about the ethics of my purchase, because at the end of the day I need a such-and-such and I can’t figure out a more ethically sound way to get hold of one, which brings me to my second caveat: I’m not some kind of guru at this. I don’t, as you are certainly aware if you know me at all, float around in an organic hemp kaftan eating fairly traded aduki beans, or whatever your image of the paradigmatic ethical shopper may be. As I said two weeks ago, if you’re only bothering to make a go of this ethical shopping thing in order to attain to some picture-perfect lifestyle, you’re doing it wrong.

 

Hemp’s better for ropes than kaftans anyway. It’s also, fun fact, linguistically cognate with ‘cannabis’.

In which vein, buying products you don’t actually need, simply because they fit the ethical profile that suits the lifestyle to which you’re aspiring, isn’t ethical at all. This, indeed, is my third caveat: often the most ethical decision is not to buy anything at all. I remember reading on the Fairphone website a declaration that the most ethical phone you can choose is one you already own (a surprising assertion from a company that exists to sell phones, and so all the more worth paying attention to). The world is already filled with an extravagant excess of consumer goods; using up more resources and creating more rubbish is something we should try to avoid as much as we can. Beg, borrow, steal – OK, don’t steal, but definitely borrow, make, or otherwise improvise before you buy. This principle clashes, of course, with the concern that we need to be buying things in order to support the people who make them, but all we’ve really done there is loop back round to my first caveat.

At any rate, my belief that often the best purchase to make is no purchase at all has generated what is perhaps an unfortunate side effect in view of the real point of this blog post, that I basically don’t buy stuff particularly often, so that the number of ethical retailers I’ve actually patronised myself, and am therefore able to recommend with any real conviction, is as yet rather small. I have therefore recruited the help of my older sister, who also takes an interest in these matters, with the hope that pooling our knowledge might yield a wider selection of recommendations and advice for my lovely readers to enjoy.

Here begins the not-at-all-exhaustive list of our suggestions for where to buy things that cause slightly fewer problems for the world than is usual:

Charity shops – obvious, really, but worth mentioning explicitly, since they score well on all three of my alliterative principles (providing one chooses one’s product carefully), and a further advantage is that there are almost certainly a good number of them in whichever shopping district you prefer to frequent. Nor are these just for clothes: there are plenty that sell furniture and household items too, not to mention books, entertainment, and so forth.

Other second-hand retailers – personally, I derive a good deal of enjoyment from browsing rails of lovely dresses in vintage shops,⁶ while my sister, in her own words, prefers staying in the house and browsing retail websites such as eBay (https://www.ebayinc.com/our-company). eBay sells both new and second-hand products, so you can factor in that concern alongside others like your seller’s location.

People who make stuff – for example, I own two gorgeous cushions, a cleverly-structured washbag, and a unique knitted hat, which were all made by the residents of a village near the city where I grew up, and purchased (for far less than I’d have paid in a gift shop) at the triennial⁷ flower festival held at the village abbey. It’s a case of keeping an eye out, really. Or if you’d rather stay on the sofa, Etsy (https://www.etsy.com/uk/mission?ref=hp&from=homepage.about_etsy) is a good shout, particularly since, in a marketplace so vast, there are bound to be sellers who cater to even your nichest interests; for example, my sister once purchased an attractive set of rings based on the video game Skyrim.

Independent shops – this includes your local butcher, baker, candlestick maker, farmers’ market, greengrocer, chemist, health food shop, tea room, ‘community grocery’ (as Exeter’s Read Food Store styles itself, http://www.realfoodexeter.co.uk/food-policy) – anywhere that’s independently owned and focusses on locally-obtained products is ticking a lot of boxes. Actually going into a shop and picking things up also gives you a lot of control over levels of packaging: why put a hand of bananas in one of those superfluous plastic bags, for instance, when they can go straight into your reusable shopping bag as they are quite happily?

As far as purchasing new products from specific larger companies goes, here are a few that stand out for us:

Clothes

Thought clothing (https://www.wearethought.com/our-thoughtful-way) – formerly branded under Braintree, these guys make the loveliest bamboo tights ever, as well as recommendable cardigans, dresses, jackets, socks, etc.

People Tree (http://www.peopletree.co.uk/about-us/mission) – another ethically-minded clothing brand; my sister can recommend their navy-blue shorts.

Lady Vintage (https://www.ladyvlondon.com/about-us) – make all their gorgeous vintage-inspired garments in London. (Anything made in the UK automatically scores well on People because we have laws guaranteeing working conditions, pay, and so forth.)

Technology

Fairphone (https://www.fairphone.com/en/our-goals) – not only do these guys make every effort to source their materials fairly, but their latest model represents something of a revolution in repairability thanks to its modular design. (And I can testify that it’s a good-quality phone as well.)

House of Marley (https://www.thehouseofmarley.co.uk/principles) – the most sustainably-produced headphones you’ll find anywhere, with amazing noise-cancelling too (as anyone who’s ever tried to communicate with me while I’ve got mine on will confirm). Stocked by HMV, which is useful.

Cosmetica⁸

Green People (https://www.greenpeople.co.uk/our-story) – cosmetic products with more organicky certifications than you can shake a stick at, an unusually solid score on Ethical Consumer,⁹ and ingredient lists which actually consist of comprehensible natural items, rather than just chemical nonsense.¹⁰

Lush (https://uk.lush.com/tag/our-policies) – hurrah, a brand you’ve heard of! Their latest ethically-minded policy is to do away, as far as possible, with plastic packaging, but that’s far from the only thing for which they can be commended, and of course another plus is that they have a branch in most reasonably-sized cities.

Lily Lolo (https://www.lilylolo.co.uk/pu+about-lily-lolo+story+1) – this is a mineral make-up brand (which my sister informs me is a Good Thing) who, again, do well on ingredients as well as ethics of production. One downside is that few actual shops currently stock their stuff; one of the few is Aromatika (https://www.aromatika.co.uk/pages/about-us), a local Devon company who are also responsible for my very favourite facial cleanser.

Food

Milk&More (https://www.milkandmore.co.uk/our-story) – you know how in the olden days somebody would deliver milk to your door in glass bottles that you would then return for reuse? Well, you can still get that, which is very useful in a household like the one we grew up in, where vital resources like milk and orange juice would disappear at quite an alarming rate. They also deliver other food items, so do check that out for yourself.

 

No more need for rubbish (in a very literal sense) plastic milk bottles.

This is a trickier category to make recommendations in when it comes to larger retailers; it really is more a case of working out what’s on offer in your local area.

Miscellaneous

Gusti Leder (https://www.gusti-leather.co.uk/the-world-of-gusti) – it’s blooming difficult to find an ethical leather goods company, because, in the minds of many ethcially-concerned consumers, making products out of animal skin is unethical from the off – but these guys fit the bill, and my new handbag is very nice indeed.

Ecoffee (https://ecoffeecup.eco/about-us) –stylish reusable coffee cups, made of bamboo. With the money you’ll save by getting own-cup discounts, it’ll pay for itself in due course (depending, of course, on how much coffee you drink). Bamboo is amazing as a sustainable material, and you can make almost anything from it, from crockery to socks.¹¹

Obviously these are just a few of our favourites to get you started, and there’ll be loads out there that we don’t know about. In any case, as I stressed above, options will differ from place to place, but tracking these kinds of retailers down is good fun in itself.

If you’ve been clicking links on the way down and have done a bit of product-browsing, you’ll likely have noticed that, price-wise, ethically-minded brands tend to be towards the higher end of what’s normal. On one level, this just makes sense: retailers that sell products cheaply often achieve their appealing prices by cutting corners on issues of Product, People, Planet, or indeed all three. It’s also true that ethics are still a fairly niche concern amongst consumers, and niche products do tend to be more expensive. Still, I’d say it’s worth spending a bit more than one would otherwise for the sake of sound ethics. If you’re following the principle of not buying stuff you don’t need, and getting hold of a fair bit of what you do buy second hand, you’ll have more money left over to spend on other things anyway – but the key thing is that if you’re parting with your cash in order to place it in hands where it’s going to do good, then of course it’s perfectly all right to be parting with bit more of that cash than you might otherwise spend. Budget sensibly, granted, but don’t consider it some kind of failure in the virtue of thrift to spend more on a particular product than you might ordinarily. As ever, it’s about working out your own priorities.

And with that, and the hope that you find some use in the above suggestions (both specific and less so), we wish you all happy shopping. Do drop any particularly stunning recommendations of your own in the comments box below.

Footnotes

¹ I hasten to add that the dialogue continues with Donna retorting, “Is that why you travel round with a human at your side? It’s not so you can show them the wonders of the universe, it’s so you can take cheap shots?” Because this was before Doctor Who started aggressively claiming ownership of the moral high ground at every possible opportunity. As ever, thanks to http://www.chakoteya.net/ for the transcript, and NowMyWingsFit for the recommendation.

² ‘Money is Power’, under ‘February’ in the box on the right.

³ I can’t reference properly because I don’t have a copy to hand, but I’m pretty sure this is the book in question: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/393418.The_Rough_Guide_To_Ethical_Shopping.

⁴ Unless you count the Flood, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6&version=ESVUK, but of course that was less a solution in itself and more a trailer for the great solution to come…

⁵ I here allude to Galatians 6:9-10. Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+6&version=ESVUK.

⁶ The best, though not the only good, one in Exeter is The Real McCoy, http://therealmccoy.co.uk/, where I once bought an actual ballgown for ten quid, no word of a lie.

⁷ At least, I think it’s triennial. I may be wrong.

⁸ This is a word I have made up, in imitation of a Latin or Greek neuter plural, to mean ‘cosmetic items’ in an all-and-sundry sense.

⁹ Ethical Consumer, http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/, awards scores out of twenty according to a variety of ethical criteria. It’s particularly good for checking which of the bigger and more mainstream brands are less awful than the others, but sometimes seems to require subscription for access to the juicy details.

¹⁰ If the matter of ingredients in cosmetics is of interest to you, I direct you towards another post that my sister and I collaborated on, ‘Good Chemistry’, under ‘2016’ then ‘November’ in the box on the right.

¹¹ Crockery includes a rather stylish apple-adorned range by dotcomgiftshop, of which I own a selection of pieces including this one: https://www.dotcomgiftshop.com/vintage-apple-bamboo-dinner-plate. As for socks, I own bamboo ones of various brands; if I want more, I usually just pop into Sancho’s Dress on Fore Street – another example of a local, independent shop committed to solid ethics – and browse their selection: https://www.sanchosdress.com/pages/about-us.