Finding out more about ethical products?
Answer:
Links to all sorts of possibilities in the appendix of the link.
Positive buying
Positive buying means favoring ethical products, be they fair trade, cruelty free, organic, recycled, re-used, or produced locally. This option is arguably the most important since it directly supports progressive companies.
Standards and labels
International Fairtrade Certification Mark
The international symbol for recycling.A number of standards and labels have been introduced to induce positive buying, such as:
Ethiscore is a system of 'ethical scoring' for companies and products developed by Ethical Consumer which rates companies against a number of ethical criteria
Fairtrade
Social Accountability 8000 - a universal standard for ethical sourcing, sometimes unofficially called "sweatshop-free"
Sweatshop Free Clothing
organic food
Organic Trade Association
Co-op America
shade-grown coffee
kosher (religious standard)
halaal (religious standard)
vegan
free-range poultry
grass fed beef
union-made
dolphin safe fish
recycled
FSC-certified ("environmentally friendly") wood
Product Red
Along with disclosure of ingredients, some mandatory labelling of origins of clothing or food is required in all developed nations. This practice has been extended in some developing nations, e.g., in China where every item of clothing carries the name, phone number and fax number of the factory where it was made so a buyer can inspect its conditions. And, more importantly, to prove that the item was not made by "prison labor", use of which to produce export goods is banned in most developed nations. Such labels have also been used for boycotts, as when the merchandise mark Made in Germany was introduced in 1887.
These labels serve as tokens of some reliable validation process, some instructional capital, much as does a brand name or a nation's flag. They also signal some social capital, or trust, in some community of auditors that must follow those instructions to validate those labels. Theoretically, any such label could be false, and any such auditor or inspector could be bribed or misled. One inhibitor to wider use of more standard labels is low trust and inability to validate truly global standards for what such labels might mean.
Over time, some theorists suggest, the amount of social capital or trust invested in nation-states (or "flags") will continue to decrease, and that placed in corporations (or "brands") will increase. This can only be offset by retrenched national sovereignty to reinforce shared national standards in tax, trade, and tariff laws, and by placing the trust in civil society in such "moral labels". These arguments have been a major focus of the anti-globalization movement, which includes many broader arguments against the amoral nature of markets as such. However, the economic school of Public Choice Theory pioneered by James M. Buchanan has offered counter-arguments based on economic demonstration to this theory of 'amoral markets' versus 'moral governments'
there are several ethical magazines, eg
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/magazines-newspa...
but you probably won't see them on the high streer
just google for ethical shoping will bring up loads of resources.
but your ethcs may not be the same as someone elses, so you need to be clear on what that means for you.
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