Max Gladwell

A dozen ways to make more healthy and ethical buying decisions: Greener One, Giving Pal, Alonovo, Amazon Green, KnowMore, EcoPerks, OsoEco, Gigoit, Freecycle, Giveness, Green Home and (RED).

Let’s be clear: we’re not going to shop or spend our way out of this mess. And by “this mess” we mean the triple threat of a climate, energy, and food crisis coupled with a consumer- and waste-driven culture of planned obsolescence, toxic ingredients, and disposable by design. Consumer spending will not save us or our planet, just as it won’t save our tanking economy. This, of course, has been the Bush administration’s answer to everything from Iraq to the recession (both of them), which is proof enough that it doesn’t work. (We won’t get into the economy for now, other than to quote from Fortune magazine: “You gotta love it–private profits, socialized losses.”) No, consuming our way to a better quality of life is not what we’re talking about. But it is possible to make everyday spending, which accounts for 70% of our $14 trillion US economy, a real part of the solution.

There’s no getting around the fact that we need stuff. Some measure of shopping is a part of our daily or weekly lives. How we allocate these financial resources–the votes we cast every day with our wallets– impacts our personal health, both directly and indirectly, while simultaneously rippling throughout the global economy. A fair trade cup of coffee bought in New York can support a local merchant and a Columbian farmer just as a toy bought in Los Angeles can be toxic for your child while wreaking havoc on a community in China. This is where the marriage of conscious consuming and social shopping can have a serious impact.

Conscious consuming is an awareness of the social and environmental impacts of the things we buy. Social shopping is getting advice from friends and acquaintances on what to buy. When these forces unite through the social web, the possibilities are astounding. Thanks to the virtues of Web 2.0–network effects, crowdsourcing, and the wisdom of crowds–it’s becoming easier for large numbers of consumers (that’s us) to make more healthy and ethical buying decisions. By these same virtues, increased participation leads to greater efficiencies and better results. Results that can contribute to curbing greenhouse emissions, promoting human rights, supporting disaster relief, and improving our collective quality of life.

Following are 12 ways to become a more conscious and enlightened Web 2.0 consumer:

Greener One: We’ve heard several pitches along these lines, but this is the first we’ve seen in beta. Greener One seeks to develop a universal, LEED-like rating system for consumer products. Only instead of gathering a group of experts and analyzing everything in a lab, this model will gather insight and feedback from the community in determining a “green index” for any given product. CEO Zoli Piroska wants to build a “crowdsourced database of green attributes for consumer products” using its wiki platform. This will provide consumers with an easy guide to conscious buying, from flat screens to baby wipes, when the Web isn’t immediately available. And you’ll feel confident in the knowledge that it was determined by the wisdom of a crowd.

Giving Pal: This model taps into the margin that manufacturers and/or retailers make on our everyday purchases from retailers like Amazon, BestBuy, and Netflix and diverts a portion of that to your charity or cause of choice. Users can search products through the main site or add a bookmarklet to their Firefox toolbar in order to add items to their wishlist while surfing the Web. These can be organized by events like weddings and birthdays. Nonprofits can sign up to become eligible for those donations.

Alonovo: We covered this in our Ten Ways post. One of the key differentiators here is being able to prioritize your own values, which provide a filter to help you find products that are right for you. “You can weight issues according to your individual values. Once you set your values, the Company Report Card ratings change to reflect [them].” There is an emphasis on corporate social responsibility with 40 different criteria by which to rate a company. All shopping is handled by Amazon.com, and 50-100% of the commission is donated to a charity of choice.

OsoEco: We’re happy to announce that, as of last week, OsoEco launched in public beta. This is a product-driven wiki that enables the community to import healthy-green items or “finds” from around the web using a simple bookmarklet. Once on OsoEco, they’re up for discussion, reviews, tagging, and ratings, complete with a link back to the product. Members can also import articles and start conversations around most any topic. One of the goals of the site is to “create a rich and prosperous shared language around green and health/wellness” through it’s Tagriculture. This is one of the big challenges of green living: universally accepted semantics.

KnowMore.org: This activist-driven nonprofit exposes corporate abuse in order help promote ethical consumerism. The organization recently debuted a new Firefox extension that “alerts you when you visit the websites of unethical companies. The extension is powered by Knowmore’s new API – which enables any developer to take Knowmore’s corporate data and build web apps that empower consumers and help citizens hold corporations accountable.” KnowMore.org is a wiki-style site where the users create all of the data. Based on some of its standards, though, it’s tough to imagine a large, multinational company that wouldn’t qualify as unethical.

Amazon Green: If you already use Amazon for books and other purchases, it’s as simple as navigating to this area of the site and making one-click purchases. Based on the initial premise that ecommerce is more environmentally friendly than traditional retailing, Amazon outlines a number of additional ways the company is saving energy and reducing waste. The first step in the green section is to pick the three products you wish everyone had. These votes determine the most popular products, such as (1) CFLs, (2) reusable grocery bags, and (3) a push lawnmower without actually having to buy them. As with other parts of Amazon, user reviews play a huge role.

EcoPerks: Every airline, credit card, and coffee shop offers some type of reward program. Buy enough of their stuff and get more stuff for free. EcoPerks takes a slightly different tact. Everything you do on the site earns EcoPoints. One of those activities is to “shop smart“. Depending on the retailer, you accumulate points-per-dollar-spent that can be redeemed for carbon offsets and other goods (Perks). In addition, each purchase earns points for your environmental organization of choice. The site features a learning section, where you can earn points as you discover ways to live green

Freecycle: This five-million-member-strong nonprofit is a decentralized organization that encourages and enables the local trading or “freecycling” of goods from someone who wants to give it away to someone who needs it (for free), rather than have it end up in a landfill. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer. Santa Monica, which has some 3,000 members, uses a Yahoo! Group for its hub, as do most.

Giveness: This social networking platform enables people to shop using many top online retailers (those with affiliate programs), whereupon the commissions those purchases generate are donated to your chariy of choice. It is also a platform for nonprofits to network with Giveness members, promote their causes, and generate donations. Nonprofits can also encourage their existing supporters to shop through Giveness, since it essentially costs them nothing. The company promotes itself through MySpace and Facebook using profiles as well as widgets.

Green Home: We wrote about Green Home’s new Facebook widget, Green My Ride, already. This is multi-featured wiki platform, which the company calls a Huddle, where the community rates, reviews, and writes articles about green products in six major categories: transportation, home, electricity generation, cleaning supplies, personal care, and yard work. It’s primarily a resource for researching products and sharing your knowledge or experience with them. There is no direct commerce currently, and it’s not clear whether that is part of the business model.

(RED): Co-founded by Bono and Bobby Shriver, (RED) is a beacon of conscious consuming with a specific mission to battle AIDS in Africa. When you buy (RED)-stamped products from Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Motorola, Converse, American Express and others, a portion of it goes to The Global Fund by way of (RED). Those proceeds help to supply medicines and other essential aid to HIV/AIDS victims throughout the African continent. MySpace is an official partner–or shall we say, “friend”–of (RED).

Gigoit: Quite similar to Freecycle, this is an exchange where transactions are valued by the amount of waste that’s diverted from our landfills. Gigo stands for “garbage in, garbage out”. It’s a simple model where people list perfectly good stuff that they’d otherwise throw away so that others can find it. We searched our zip code and found nothing within 25 or even 1,000 miles of Santa Monica. It clearly needs more participation to be useful. Fortunately, there is a Facebook “Gigoit Free Stuff” application and a number of Google tools to help the company reach critical mass.

The next step in conscious, social shopping is going mobile. ScanLife enables camera phones like the iPhone to read scannable EZcodes that can be printed most anywhere, including product packaging. These codes can immediately link users to a wealth of data about carbon footprints, countries of origin, consumer reviews, recycled content, and much more that may not be found on the label. Since some of this info changes, it will be an efficient way to keep it current. Consumers will be able to compare the social and environmental footprints of two products, including those of the company that’s selling it, prior to making a decision, and it’ll be as easy as taking a photo. Watch this video to see how it works:

These are just the beginning. If you know of others, please link to them in the comments. We’ll be reviewing many of these services in more depth in the months to come.

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