Cruelty Free Shopping Made Easy

Happy New Year! To celebrate 2010, I got you a website that makes it easy to find out which cosmetic / toiletry / household good companies don’t test their products on animals.

Here’s the site, and here’s why:

In cosmetics and household products research, painful experiments are carried out on hundreds of thousands of animals every year in the UK, including dogs, rabbits, pigs, mice, rats, guinea-pigs, fish and birds. This includes tests for skin or eye irritation, skin sensitisation (allergy), toxicity (poisoning), mutagenicity (genetic damage), teratogencity (birth defects), carcinogenicity (causing cancer), embryonic or fetal genetic damage and toxicokinetics (to study the absorption, metabolism, distribution and excretion of the substance).

Every year is a good year for ethical consumerism!

54% of Consumers Care About Product Sustainability

Some of you might read this and think “only half of shoppers care?” while some of you might read this and think “that’s more than I thought!”. What I find most captivating is that this statistic is from a survey done by marketers to find out if people truly care about the environmental sustainability of a product. Just think, twenty, or even ten years ago people would’ve laughed at you if you mentioned how bad some products are for the environment.

Today half of shoppers will choose the more environmental product and now 95% of shoppers are willing to shop green. Here’s the press release on the survey.

“We found that for most shoppers, sustainable considerations are an important tie breaker when deciding between two otherwise equal products and they are a driver in product switching,” said Brian Lynch, GMA director of sales and sales promotion. “But it’s not enough to just put green products on the shelf. We have to better educate consumers and leverage in-store communication to make the sale.”

Most shoppers surveyed, 95 percent, are open to considering green products, 67 percent of shoppers looked for green products, only 47 percent actually found them and 22 percent purchased some green products on their shopping trip, highlighting the need for better shopper marketing programs to close the gap. Sometimes concerns about product performance and credibility of the environmental claims are the reasons shoppers opt not to buy green products, but more often communication and product education are the biggest obstacles. The study also found that a significant minority of committed and proactive green shoppers will pay a premium for sustainable products; however, the larger potential population of shoppers that lean toward green want price and performance parity for sustainable products because it is not their dominant purchase driver.

Consumers Can Make a Difference

Continuing this week’s focus on the successful Blog Action Day is an editorial from LifeHack. Dustin Wax waxes ecstatic about how the best solution for the environment is for us to buy less, just stop consuming. I agree with his conclusion, but how he gets there is not something I will blindly support. It’s a good read though and I encourage to go read it (and also to buy less).

For most of us, simply dropping out, growing our own food and living off our own labor, is not an option and is hardly desirable even if it were an option. The answer to the dreadful over-consumption that fills our landfills with completely unnecessary crap, pollutes our water sources, kills off species after species (something like 40 a day!), and leaves us in a world of ever-diminishing beauty and diversity can’t be to drop out of consumption entirely, because it’s simply not an option.

But we can change the way we consume, and more importantly lessen the demands we place on consumption to complete us as individuals. This means developing a higher sense of self-reflexivity about what we do buy, and replacing our identities as consumers with identities as part of our families and communities — and maybe even as producers, once again.

Shop on the Fringe and be Healthy

Shopping on the periphery of grocery stores ensures that you’ll purchase healthier food than if you were to go down ever aisle. Life Hacker agrees with shopping outside the aisle.

That’s where all the fresh foods are. The less you find yourself in the central aisles of the grocery store, the healthier your shopping trip will be. Make it a habit–work the perimeter of the store for the bulk of your groceries, then dip into the aisles for staples that you know you need.

All Recipes has a list of ten ways that will help in your regular food shopping including buying organic and shopping on a full stomach.

Eat good to stay good 🙂

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