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Shopping our way to something better

After The New York Times ran an article in January headed "In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad" a lot of people were outraged.

After The New York Times ran an article in January headed "In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad" a lot of people were outraged.

The story hung on an explosion and fire in a factory in Chengdu owned by the Taiwan-based multinational and major Apple partner, Foxconn. More than 120,000 people work at the Foxconn Chengdu factory on 24/7 assembly lines, most of them young Chinese from rural areas.

The blast immediately killed two people and injured dozens, including 22-year-old college grad, Lai Xiaodong, who worked in the area where iPad cases were polished. Two years earlier, more than 100 workers in another plant in China were injured when they had to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens.

Lai later succumbed to his injuries. Reported as earning US$22 a day for 12-hour shifts, he subsequently became something of a poster child for worker abuse in China, which has "the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth."

"That system," says the Times, "has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up." We consumers snap them up like alligators.

As the Times story gained traction, I wondered if people would react and actually change their iSomething buying patterns.

Then there are all the folks who have no idea how poor most of the labour practices are that produce their latest e-gizmo or appliance. But if they did, would they reach for another choice? Or embarrass companies like Apple into changing?

 I dream of the day when consumers can instantly see how sustainable their "consumption" is before they buy.

We wouldn't have to dig out our questionably-produced iPhones or fumble for that tatty paper or shopping guide to learn what to buy and what not to. And we certainly wouldn't have to wait for policy makers who are asleep at the wheel to start driving a better world.

Whether it's a movie ticket, a bag of noodles or a sweater, I picture an appealing, easy-to-understand, sliding-scale rating system for the resource footprint of each product or service we buy — both on the environmental and social side.

Think of it like the five-star rating system on www.yelp.ca/vancouver to gauge everything from gelato to hairdressers, or the five-tomato system for rating movies on www.rottentomatoes.com. Only better.

My dream system would be universal, so you'd see the rating marks or logos on the label of your noodles or your iSomething, wherever it was made. And you could completely trust that the certifying program behind the marks was rigorous, transparent and neutral — no hidden agendas.

On the environmental side we would have, say, cute little bird faces, given how ubiquitous birds are and their sensitivity to negative eco-changes. Goods and services with the best environmental impact in terms of climate change, toxins and pollution would earn five bird faces. Poor performers would get one bird face — or none.

On the social side, a human hand could be used. Five hands would go to products and services that treat their workers the best, including providing decent wages and safe, healthy working conditions. One or no hands would be on the labels of products whose workers are treated poorly, like that factory in Chengdu.

IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE

With more and more consumers trying to "do the right thing" and more and more manufacturers trying to cash in on that impulse, confusion reigns. Greenwashing plays no little part.

Greenwashing is defined as "the tactic of misleading consumers about a product or service's environmental friendliness" in the Sins of Greenwashing report published by Ottawa-based TerraChoice. Now called UL TerraChoice, it was bought up in 2010 by the standards arm of Underwriters Laboratories Inc., which you might recognize for its work in fire protection and safety standards.

TerraChoice is the environmental marketing company created in 1998 to manage Canada's EcoLogo program on behalf of our federal government, which created EcoLogo back in the 1980s.

With more than 10,000 different products and 70 separate standards under its certifying belt and hundreds of companies in its stable, from Fortune 500s to start-ups, EcoLogo has grown to be the largest environmental standard in North America. It enjoys a global reputation for its stringency and reliability as a neutral third-party certifier.

But you may not be familiar with the EcoLogo mark since much of its certifying work happens at the business-to-business level in sectors like building products, office supplies and cleaning products. (The distinctive EcoLogo mark used originally was three little birds that formed a maple leaf. A new mark has now been created that says Certified EcoLogo.)

In Sins of Greenwashing, TerraChoice surveyed nearly 5,300 "green" consumer products and found that 95 per cent of them (5,031, to be exact) made "claims that are demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences" — claims like saying a product is "organic" when a mere 0.1 per cent of its ingredients are organic, or making irrelevant claims like "CFC-free" when chlorofluorocarbons are banned by law.

I haven't yet discovered a "greenwash" equivalent on the social side, but the TerraChoice report nicely exposes at least one part of the label-confusion out there.

Some companies even make up their own fake "mark" with no external, verifiable standards to back it up. Others take a more subtle approach, such as using a lot of white in the label to allude to "science" and the colour green, for obvious reasons. Words like "green" or "nature-friendly" are often used, again with no third-party verification.

But be careful — it's too easy to misinterpret a report like this one and reduce it to a one-liner like 95 per cent of green products are greenwash hogwash.

The TerraChoice report is not saying that goods with logos that meet rigorous, transparent, neutral third-party certification standards, like EcoLogo or other such credible programs, are misleading. The opposite is true — good, reliable marks or logos are your best assurance when it comes to stepping over the greenwash and doing good with your shopping choices.

But that still doesn't tackle the confusion arising from myriad other marks out there.

Given our global economy, where goods can be wholly or partially grown, raised or made just about anywhere then reassembled someplace else, the average shopper has way too much to navigate trying to sort through the dozens of valid marks or logos used on labels, never mind the flood of questionable ones that have popped up over 34 years. That's when the first "eco-label" was launched — Blue Angel in Germany.

A report on labels, logos and whether they improve sustainability in production was done last year by SustainAbility, an independent think tank in the U.K.. While the report "applauds the ways certifications, labels and standards have advanced more sustainable business practices" it worries that "we are reaching scale" and "shouldn't certify and label everything."

The report's cover sports more than 200 different marks, from familiar ones — like the triangulating arrows for "recycled" and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) logo for sustainable wood fibre — to the obscure. For instance, would you recognize and, more importantly, understand the meaning of a Future Friendly mark on laundry soap? Is it legitimate? What about a Green Tourism logo on a hotel? Would you choose a printer with the Green Label Singapore or one marked Green It?

"The problem is there are too many [marks] out there," says Angela Griffiths, executive director of the EcoLogo program. "It's well known that we need to consolidate." In fact, part of a recent initiative EcoLogo worked on was to try and standardize common standards between different countries.

In the meantime, we all have our little strategies for navigating the onslaught. I look for marks I know I can trust, like EcoLogo, FSC and Fair Trade; the Swan mark from Europe; and USDA, Canadian and BC organic certification.

At the same time, I know I'm ignoring a bunch of good, reliable marks I simply don't know much about. No doubt social aspects like equity and equality for workers are missing from the marks I follow. Also, there's no sliding scale like my dream system would offer to compare relative qualities.

Some informed experts — like Cheeying Ho, executive director of the Whistler Centre for Sustainability — tend to ignore labelling marks altogether for various reasons.

"I don't really look for eco-labels," she says. "I look for organic and I tend to read ingredient lists because unless I know exactly how a product is certified and how accurate it is, it's hard to trust. Also, just because it has a label does it mean it's the highest standard?"

Fiona Crofton, a University of British Columbia professor and policy analyst steeped in sustainable development, has a different strategy.

"It depends on the mark and who put it there, like 'organic' is one I ignore. Okay, it's organic, but what organic standard is it?, because they're all so different," she says.

"If we're talking about packaged products, I look for who made it and where's it from because I would know enough about the suppliers that I could trust that product. But the trick in the last few years is a lot of trusted brands have now become marketable and been bought up by other companies.

"So it gets it very tricky."

COULD IT WORK & WOULD IT MAKE A DIFFERENCE?

Now I'm convinced that we need my universal dream system more than ever.

Presuming my program would be as good as or better than existing ones in terms of rigour and reliability — that is, producers and service providers do what's reported and report what they do — what sorts of challenges would we face in pulling it together?

"It would be hard to imagine a point where we would all agree on the criteria, that's fundamentally the problem," says EcoLogo's Griffiths. "The forestry issue is a case in point — the SFI and FSC debate. Some of that's related to individual and corporate values, and until we get to a point where we can really quantify sustainability it's going to be largely values-based.

"I think we can get better and fewer labels out there, but I'm just not sure how far down that path we can get until we quantify sustainability. My worry is that by that time it will be too late because you can usually only quantify something when it's gone — like the cod."

That's my worry, too. So I want my new system to have a big impact — fast — and I think one of the best ways to do that is to make it emotionally appealing, too.

Steve Jobs said we have to put love into everything we design so we have an emotional attachment to them. Mike Berners-Lee agrees.

He's the principal of Small World Consulting Ltd., which is affiliated with Lancaster University and was instrumental in putting Booths, a premium U.K. supermarket chain, on a low-carbon path. He applied many things he learned about human nature from his work with Outward Bound to his popular book, How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything, which points out the carbon footprint of, well, nearly everything, from major surgery to your cremation.

"That [emotional appeal] is completely essential," he said in a phone interview from Lancaster. "The intention of this book is that you would pick it up because it was fun to pick up — you would actually enjoy it and then you would read all this stuff. Some of it would be trivial, and some of it would be really important things, but the hope was you'd almost get tricked into understanding the really big important things."

For Crofton, the key is getting beyond the mindset that technologies are going to solve all the problems. "You can't move through the world with a whole bag of marks and tools and technologies and protocols, and expect to proceed without being conscious," she says. "I don't think it will get us as far as we need to go."

And that will take a whole lot of things, like more education, and consumers changing their values, like buying less, buying quality — and buying sustainably.

As for Ho, rather than building a new universal mark system, she'd prefer to focus on "bigger picture" strategies with more leverage, like working with government and business leaders to drive them to change, especially big ones like Wal-Mart, which have so much clout in the marketplace.

Still, consumers can make a difference.

London Drugs started its What's the Green Deal? program in 2007. It includes flagging products on shelves with little signs and backing that up with more details on the company website to educate customers about the benefits of sustainable products.

"We haven't done metrics on the sales side, but we have seen increases in sales in products like Seventh Generation. But I couldn't tell you if it's our advertising, their advertising or what's happening there," says Maury McCausland, who heads up London Drugs' sustainability programs.

EcoLogo did a big client survey last summer. Their clients feel that the EcoLogo mark really does make a difference in sales, which is what they are interested in.

"Where we've had the most traction is with professional purchasers, like hospitals, school boards, governments — those guys they are committed to greener purchasing," says Griffiths. "They are writing it into their practices, so the people working for them have to buy greener products."

She's says EcoLogo sees less impact on the consumer side, perhaps partly because it's so confusing.

"But I think it does make an impact when you purchase those greener products and support those companies that are making them," she says. "It allows them to grow, and I think it can move the market.

"That's ultimately what we're trying to do with these standards, is recognize the leaders and move the market to a place where more of them are doing better practices, and then we keep raising the bar. That's part of the whole issue as well — keep making things tougher so they [producers] get better."

How long will it take to get to a harmonized, reliable rating system? Ten years? Twenty?

"Absolutely in 20 years. Let's say 10," says Griffiths with a laugh. "I couldn't be an optimist and be in this field — you've got to be one!"

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning Canadian journalist who has been writing about sustainability and social justice issues for more than 30 years.

RESOURCES TO TIDE YOU OVER

• Behind the scenes of a good mark: the EcoLogo program www.ecologo.org/en/

• UL TerraChoice's Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Editionwww.sinsofgreenwashing.org/findings/greenwashing-report-2010/

• Business Insider's greenwash tip sheet (useful, but most of the marks recommended are U.S.-based)www.businessinsider.com/greenwashing-infographic-2011-11

• SustainAbility's Signed, Sealed... Delivered?www.sustainability.com/library/signed-sealed-delivered-phase-one

 

Check out this week's Food and Drink on page 58 for ideas on buying food sustainably.



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