Economy: Shopping & Trading Ethically
This section aims to get your community thinking about where your goods and services are bought, and how we can use the ‘power of the purse’ to help cut carbon and support the greener shopping choices available to us.
The act of buying is itself an act of choice – we choose one product over another or one supplier over another. We usually think about how much money it costs or how nice it looks. But there are other factors that your community could consider when choosing products, whether it’s where to buy your energy from, or whether you do your shopping at big chain-stores. Buying some products will create needless waste from packaging. Other goods might be made by companies that exploit their workers.
Today when it comes to spending, we have more choice than ever, but we need to start using these choices more responsibly. We can try to make sure that the choices we make have more ‘good’ impacts than ‘bad’ on the world around us – this includes our environment, our economy and our social worlds. A ‘best buy’ in terms of the effect on our planet may not mean the ‘cheapest’. This is why the Cadarn scheme aims to get communities to use their spending power wisely and think about where their money might end up before you spend.
Some very simple rules to stick by are to aim to buy Green, Local or Fair. These principles help to ensure that your money and the impacts of your choices are positive. Buying green products, such as an eco-washing up liquid or renewable energy means that the products have a smaller impact on our environment – these products usually mean less pollution, less carbon and less waste is created. Buying locally made products helps the local economy, providing jobs and ensures that the money you spend locally stays in the area instead of going out to shareholders or even other countries. Local goods also help reduce carbon as they need to travel fewer miles to get to shops and ultimately into our homes. Fairly traded goods on the other hand cut worker exploitation. Goods that cannot be made or produced locally, such as tea and chocolate, often come from third world countries where workers, including adult and children, are exploited. That is, they are paid very poorly and work extremely long hours. Fairtrade is about better prices, decent working conditions, local sustainability, and fair terms of trade for farmers and workers in the developing world. By requiring companies to pay fair prices (which must never fall lower than the market price), Fairtrade addresses the injustices of conventional trade, which traditionally discriminates against the poorest, weakest producers. It enables them to improve their position and have more control over their lives.