Nightmare before Christmas shopping: an ethical dilemma

This ethical shopping thing of mine has been going really well so far, until now. When it comes to the crunch, it’s actually really difficult to keep my morals whilst Christmas shopping. Some people are easy to shop for, some are happy with a charity donation or a charity sponsorship of some kind, whereas others are a little more complicated. I have found a few good ideas such as t-shirts from THTC, the RSPB shop and charitygifts but it’s a struggle to find exactly what I’m looking for. I might get a solio solar charger for my gadget obsessed techie friends.

Overall, my ethical shopping hasn’t been too problematic as fair trade and organic produce is becoming more and more main stream. Primark even have organic t-shirts but £4 they are hardly likely to be fair trade or anywhere near it. I have even seen TVs made of wood from sustainable forests for sale! So things are looking up. But it does seem that at Christmas all the environmental considerations seem to go out of the window. I know that I’m going to have to give in and buy a few things which wouldn’t normally fit in with my shopping rules but I don’t really have a choice. For once my morals are going to have to take a back seat whilst I buy stuff to make people happy. I’m sure I’ll be able to make up for it in the New Year. Maybe in the New Year I’ll extend my shopping rules to food. I have started to buy more organic and fair-trade food despite the huge price tags they carry so it is something I’m thinking about. Either way, I will definitely find a way to make up for my bad spending. Maybe I should spend a day without electricity and sit in the dark and think about what I have done.

Green washing for a white Christmas

It amazing me how at this time of year the press like to jump on the eco bandwagon and talk about having a ‘green Christmas’ when in actual fact, this time of year is a nightmare for the environment. I’m not just talking about all the trees being cut down and covered in tacky bits of tin foil (although all that plastic and nasty chemicals can’t help), I’m not talking about the huge amounts of wasted energy powering the Christmas lights all over the world or the waste of wrapping paper that gets used once then dumped into landfill. I’m talking about all the money spent on useless presents that no one really wants. Parents spend up to £500 per child at Christmas. I’m not some scrooge who wants to cancel Christmas or anything but a little bit of sensibility would be nice. I’ve seen parents take their kids to toys-r-us with a trolley and say ‘what do you want?’ Now that’s not what Christmas is all about.

I know it would probably be a disaster to the economy but what would happen if people only bought presents for friends and family that they knew that person would really like? What if we stopped buying toiletries, perfume and DVDs and bought meaningful presents that people would treasure rather than add to the already dusty collection of stuff that will get used/watched once if you’re lucky? I hate Christmas shopping, not for the usual reasons but because seeing so many people milling around looking for something, some generic ‘that will do’ gift for some aunty they haven’t seen in years, is such a waste of time and money. I don’t know what has caused this need to spend either. Perhaps it’s just the commercialisation of Christmas these days; fifty years ago kids were pleased with an orange for Christmas. Whatever the reason, it has spoilt Christmas for me. For me, Christmas has never been about presents but has always been about having sausages and bacon and a turkey for lunch.

Animal rights and human wrongs: ignorance to animal welfare

I’m currently reading an old book by Konrad Lorenz, one of the founders of the science of animal behaviour but I’m struggling with it. I’m not struggling with the content so much as I’m struggling to respect this great thinker due to what I suppose you could call ‘cultural differences’ or perhaps ‘ethical differences.’ You see, Lorenz kept a whole menagerie of animals in his house from song birds to lemurs and nowadays we would condemn such practise but in the 50’s issues of animal welfare were very much only beginning to be considered. In one chapter on pets he describes which birds are best bought from dealers or taken form nests to be kept as ‘interesting pets’. My edition of this book, printed in the 70s however, does contain a warning of the legality of the trade of some of the species he mentions. So it’s not all bad. At least in England anyway, we have same laws to protect our wildlife from the pet trade, however inadequate they maybe, it’s a start.

The sad thing is, 55 years after this book was written we still have a trade in exotic pets. Even Lorenz comments that with higher species the trade is ‘ethically dubious’ and since then the UK has introduced the Dangerous Wild Animals Act (1976). But since the introduction of the internet the trade has found new ways of doing business. Whilst browsing the other day I came across sites offering an array of animals for sale from sugar gliders to zebras, without so much as a disclaimer of the legality of the trade in certain species. Even the more well know sites such as eBay and youtube seem to have a rather laissez-faire attitude towards animal welfare laws with pelts and skins from cites listed species being advertised for sale on eBay and videos of pet tigers being taken for walks on youtube.

I wish I could end this rant on a lighter, positive note but I can’t. Even so called scientists aren’t doing us any favours. Recently a new pet cat called the ashera went on sale. The cat is a hybrid of the domestic cat and the serval. This dog sized cat is a beauty but how could any self respecting scientist believe it’s a good use of time and equipment to create a designer pet at the expense of genetic diversity of a rare cat? If only the time and research had been put into the conservation of this species instead of creating the feline equivalent of a prada bag.

Offsetting your guilty shopping

There are times when charity shops and ethical shopping don’t measure up and you end up in a chain store when you didn’t want to be. Things like pyjamas and underwear you just can’t get elsewhere (there are some ethical retailers such as Green Knickers but they tend to be a bit pricey). So every now and then these unethical purchases have to be made. (I’m sure there are hard core environmentalists who would argue that you can live without these things but personally, I’d rather not!). Anyway, I got thinking about these unavoidable purchases. If you can offset the guilt and carbon from flying, perhaps you can offset your unethical spendings with charity donations? For example, buying something that isn’t fair trade could be offset with donations to charities that promote fair trade and fight child labour. It’s just a case of working out how much. I spent £11 on new pyjamas yesterday, which if I was offsetting my carbon emissions from a flight would mean about a 20p donation which I think is far too little. I think between £5 and £11 is fairer, so I’ll find a charity online and make that donation today. I feel so much better now; I suppose that’s the major selling factor for these offsetting schemes!

The curse of the carrier bag

Everyone knows that plastic carrier bags litter our streets, get stuck in trees and can kill sea birds that mistake them for jelly fish. Even advertisers have picked up on this with car adverts promising that their car saves plastic bags (seems odd when you phrase it like that), Sainsbury’s keeps giving away their ‘bag for life’ bags and many supermarkets offer free ‘bag for life’ bags if you bring in some carrier bags to be recycled. But the problem runs much deeper; you see just recycling these bags isn’t enough. We need to stop making them, we need to stop giving them away to people in shops and we need to stop using them. I recently read an article in favour of the plastic bag. One of the arguments was that paper and canvas bags are useless when it rains or your food leaks but Oxfam have some great new bags made from recycled plastic. And the best thing about proper bags is that they don’t rip and they don’t hurt your hand when you’re carrying something heavy. As a commuter on the train I find canvas bags so much better than carrier bags. For a start you can fit so much more in them, put them on your shoulder and they don’t make your veg sweat either.

Plus, the best thing about canvas, recycled and jute bags is that you can buy them from charities which means that you will be helping the environment and your money will be going to a good cause too. Unfortunately, there is one thing which prevents a huge number of people from taking their own bags to the shops – apathy. For some people, using a little bit of forethought and actually remembering to take a bag or two with them is just too much like hard work. And the shops don’t help matters either: you actually have to stop the shop assistants from putting your stuff into a plastic bag. Even in shops like superdrug that are supposed to ask every customer if they want a bag, more often that not they just put your shopping into a bag. My favourites are these jute bags from the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB.Of course, I rarely go into shops anymore and when I do I proudly say I don’t need a bag, I have one already.

Mind the gap: 21st century crimes of fashion

A couple of days ago I was starting to wonder why I had bothered with this ethical shopping malarkey – did it really matter? Does anyone really care? And then the news of Gap using child labourers hit the press. Well, for a start ‘labourers’ is a bit of a stretch of the word, it seems more like slavery to me. But, for me this news just confirming my beliefs. It proved to me that we need to make a stand against this. This is not acceptable in this day and age. I, like many people, sponsor a child to be in school so she doesn’t have to work. How many people are sending off their donations to educate former child labourers but then spend more on a pair of jeans from Gap? Its time we all started to think about where are clothes, not just our food, comes from. I think its time for fair trade clothes to become as common as fair trade bananas.

Christmas badgering and ethical Christmas presents

Yes, it’s that time of year again; the adverts have started on TV and Christmas is only a matter of weeks away. This Christmas will be a little tricky for me if I’m going to keep up my ethical shopping thing (which by the way, has been going for 8 ½ weeks with only one little slip when I bought a Christmas present from Play.com). So, ethical presents. Well, really if I’m going to be spending money on stuff then I want it to really do some good which is why some of my friends will be receiving badgers for Christmas! Not real badgers of course, toy badgers from Secret World Wildlife Rescue. These adorable badger toys are free when you adopt a badger. These adoptions help pay for the care and protection of real life badgers. With the government still dragging its heels about stopping the badger culling (a reactive response to farmers complaining about bovine tuberculosis) despite all the evidence that it culling actually increases the spread of bTB, badgers need all of the help they can get.

Can you have an ethical or responsible holiday?

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted for a while. Well, the reason is that I’ve been away on holidays and before you start about carbon emissions from flying – I didn’t fly! I went to Wales which is just a few hours drive from my home (here in Southern England). Now, I do believe that carbon emissions from flying is a major contribution to climate change and I do think that people really should try to reduce the amount they fly but I don’t think all flights should be grounded and no one should fly anywhere, ever again. This extremist attitude has been widely publicised by certain individuals but tourism plays a major role in the economies of many countries and well organised tourism can be carefully managed so its impacts are minimised and its benefits are maximised. For example, the wildlife reserves of Africa probably wouldn’t be protecting their wildlife is tourism didn’t pay for their anti poaching patrols. So, by taking a holiday where you money benefits local conservation projects, employs local people and your accommodation tries to be as environmentally friendly as they can, you can actually have an ethical holiday. Generally, mass tourism is bad for everyone except the tour operator: tourists don’t see or understand the country they are in and all the profits head out of the host country. So, this is why I went to Wales, stayed in a tiny lodge on a farm and bought lots of food from little restaurants and not big American fast food chains. If you need any help with ethical holidays check out responsibletravel.com which collects holidays that try to help the local community and the environment.

Yesterday, I actually bought something, but it wasn’t for me

I went into a proper shop yesterday, not a charity shop and bought something. But I can still justify it. It wasn’t a chain store or a franchise but a small independent toy shop and I bought a little notebook and pen. Plus it wasn’t for me. I’m going to post the notebook and pen (along with a couple of jumpers) to the small girl I sponsor in Nepal. Well, I’m going to post it to the charity help2educate who run the hostel where the girl stays. Help2Educate is a great charity that helps children out of child labour jobs and funds their education so that they can lead a better life. Perhaps, if I can save enough money with this ethical shopping of mine (so far I have spent very little money) then I will be able to afford to go to Nepal and visit her in person.

Can you have an ethical wedding?

I went to a wedding on the weekend, a very nice wedding with the bride in a white dress with flowers, a buffet and a lovely reception but I could help but think ‘is this ethical?’ Can you have a wedding where the impact on the environment isn’t huge and small children in less developed countries weren’t paid a pittance to make the dresses? Well, I found the answer. Ethical weddings is a website that lists suppliers of various wedding essential which are all organic, fair-trade or environmentally sustainable or ethical in some way. It’s nice to think that even on a day famed for being extravagant can actually care too.

Ethical electricity, supporting conservation and a free DVD!

It’s been two and a half weeks of my ethical shopping lifestyle and so far it’s going really well. Apart from the usual essential bread and milk runs to the local shop, I have only bought veg from the farmshop down the road, fair-trade tea bags from Oxfam, and a t-shirt and CD from a charity shop. I must be saving a lot of money doing this. As I have to justify to myself that everything I buy is benefiting a small local business or charity (rather than a chain or franchise) I am questioning whether I actually need the things I buy or not. So far I haven’t needed to buy much food as I have squirrel tendencies and like to stock pile food so I’m yet to see how hard that’s going to be.

If I’m going to take this low impact ethical lifestyle seriously, I’ve decided that I need to do something about my energy use. I already use energy saving bulbs and turn my TV off at the wall at night but I’m also going to switch supplier. I’ve found this great offer from ecotricity with WWF. If you sign up to ecotricity they’ll donate £15 to WWF and send you a copy of ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ on DVD. Sounds like a great deal to me!

Ethical gifts and guilt free shopping

On a lighter note, I’ve been doing some browsing and I have found some great websites that are run by charities which sell some great stuff. One of my favourite online charity shops is the RSPB. They sell loads of things from bird books to clothes, household items and some great gift ideas. At the moment they are promoting their Sumatra campaign and I think the best way to support this campaign to raise awareness about the biodiversity under threat in Sumatra is by buying this lovely little Sumatran tiger soft toy.

Another one of my favourites is the Born Free shop. Born Free is a wildlife charity with lots of very worthwhile campaigns and some great products on sale. WWF, one of the most famous wildlife charities also has a shop and they also sell some great stuff like this ladybird tea set.

As you can probably tell, I do like to support wildlife charities but if you have a particular fondness of a people based charity or dog based charity or pretty much any type of charity you will be able to find a charity that you want to support on the Charity Gifts website. Here you can buy almost anything and chose which charity you want to support.

I know people often talk about retail therapy, but I have always found that spending money makes me feel bad because there are so many better things that I could do with my cash but this kind of shopping really makes me feel good – not only do you help some really worthwhile charities but you get some really cool stuff too!

These kinds of website are going to be the only way I’m going to cope with this ethical shopping campaign of mine!

Disposable items when landfills are running out

One of my pet hates is disposable items. I personally don’t see what’s wrong with using something more than once! There are so many disposable products these days it seems totally inappropriate when we are all striving towards ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ and when we all know that we’re rapidly running out of landfill space. So, you can image my dismay when I read last night in Metro (another of my pet hates - free newspapers) about disposable rocket launchers. For a start weapons manufacturing encourages war and conflict and the money spent on them by governments should be used to fight famine, invest in education, healthcare and whole host of more needy departments but disposable weapons? That seems to be a complete contradiction of everything the government seems to be working towards. I can’t help but wonder if these weapons will be included in the electrical waste legislation WEEE where the manufacturer or retailer is responsible for recycling the product when it has come to the end of its lifespan. I do hope so otherwise this is a blatant disregard for the environment and makes a mockery of all the efforts of every other industry that’s at least trying to be more environmentally friendly.

The trouble with buying ethical food…

So far I’ve been doing this ethical spending thing for just over a week and I’ve been pretty good. I have bought a t-shirt from a charity shop and that’s been it apart from food. But food is where I’m really struggling. I went out to dinner the other night and went to my local pub that I can walk to. Great so far, no pollution from travel costs and supporting my local business but they didn’t say if any of the food was local or organic and had actually labelled their lamb as from New Zealand. Now personally, I really don’t like food that’s travelled more than I have, so I really resent food from the other side of the world, especially considering the fuel costs involved. But if I travel to a restaurant that sells fair-trade organic food I will have to drive (well, get someone else to drive me) and personally I think that’s worse. So, the stance is I will do my best with food, I’ll buy my tea bags from Oxfam, my veg from the farm shop and try to buy as much organic, fair-trade and local as possible but I’m not going to tie myself in knots over it. It’s just too difficult. So, apart from the food problem it’s going great!

The organic dilemma

I have come across a bit of a problem with things that are organic. Firstly, food. I can go into a supermarket and buy organic apples which also good for the environment they were grown in (which is often the USA or South Africa) really aren’t good in the carbon footprint department. It seems ridiculous to me that major supermarket chains can market these ‘green’ foodstuffs when they have been flown half way round the world. And that not even considering that they are yet another chain. So, I think I’m going to ignore most organic stuff and just try to buy as much as I can from the farmshop down the road. They had strawberries there the other day which were grown just a mile away from my house! Surely it’s more important to support a small local business that to pay over the odds for organic food, wrapped in plastic, from a chain store?

Secondly, I was most annoyed a few weeks ago when the organic dress I bought from a small independent shop in the Brighton lanes was being modelled on a manikin in the window of New Look. For a start I thought I had something a bit more unique that the unusual high street stuff and does that mean that the profits have gone to a New Look supplier? It’s so complicated just trying to buy the right things and there isn’t a labelling system on clothes. For all I know my organic dress could be from a sweat shop and there’s no way to tell. So, back to the charity shops for me. At least with charity shops I’ve saving the clothes from the landfill, donating money to charity and I’m not adding any demand for new clothes.

This isn't going to be easy...

I started this ethical buying spree on Saturday and so far I haven’t bought anything (except train tickets which I can’t live without) and it’s been pretty easy. But I’ve realised that certain things I was planning on buying a few weeks ago, I now can’t. I can’t buy CDs now, unless I can find them in a charity shop (I have a great The Cure album from a charity shop so it is possible). Buying shoes, especially trainers won’t be easy. I’m not too worried about buying clothes as I live in charity shops most of the time anyway and there are some great online charity shops like Oxfam’s generation why. But toiletries? How do I do that? And toothpaste? Most toothpastes are made my big pharmaceutical companies or multinationals so I have to stand my ground on that one but what the alternative? I’m going to need to do some serious research just to keep clean!

And so it begins...

Whilst in London on the weekend, I went to Harrods for the first time in my life and I hated it. It was busy with self indulgent people buying over priced stuff and for what? I know shopping makes people happy but lining the pockets of fat cats really doesn't do it for me. So whilst still wandering the opulent halls of Harrods I vowed that from now on I will only buy stuff that doesn't make those fat cats fatter - I'm only going to buy stuff from charities, thats fair trade or organic. When I say stuff I mean pretty much everything except food. So this blog is my diary so I can vent my difficulties and share my successes! So here goes...