Rolf Jucker
Ethical and Ecological Consumption
"It took Britain half the resources of the planet to achieve its prosperity; how many planets will a country like India require?" (Mahatma Ghandi on the question whether India would reach Britain's standard of living after independence)[1]
1. Background: assessing the impact of our actions
The starting point for any sensible theory (and practice) of consumption has to be the insight that every time you buy and/or consume something — be it a tiny battery to keep your watch going or be it a TV, a car or a hamburger — you are making an impact on the social, economic and ecological environment. In the words of Anwar Fazal, former president of the International Organisation of Consumer Unions (IOCU): "The act of buying is a vote for an economic and social model, for a particular way of producing goods. We are concerned with the quality of goods and the satisfactions we derive from them. But we cannot ignore the conditions under which products are made — the environmental impact and working conditions. We are linked to them and therefore have a responsibility for them."[2]
In order words: We cannot just take pleasure in enjoying the goods while we possess or consume them. We also bear the responsibility for the answers to the following questions: Are the products produced in an environmentally harmful or sustainable manner? Do the workers producing them get a fair price? Do they have safe and healthy working conditions (see for example banana workers) Are the substances used in production and in the product itself safe or toxic? Can the product be recycled at the end of its lifespan? If not, is it biodegradable or does it release toxic substances when landfilled or incinerated (such as PVC, which releases Dioxin, one of the most toxic substance mankind has ever invented)? Do we pay the price for all the social and environmental costs a product is creating or are these costs shifted onto other people (e.g. ‘Third World’ countries) or the public (e.g. environmental clean-up measures, usually paid for by the taxpayer)? Does the company producing the goods deal with oppressive regimes, thereby furthering human rights abuses? Is the company involved in arms production, nuclear energy, animal testing, factory farming, irresponsible marketing, suppression of worker's rights? Is the production company donating money to political parties? An example: if you take just some of these questions seriously it is virtually impossible to buy any children's toys from China or other southeast asian countries anymore, because of the way the factory workers are treated there.[3]
Another example is the 'McLibel'-campaign. Triggered by the libel writs against Helen Steel and David Morris these two plus hundreds of international supporters have exposed every possible aspect of the worldwide business practices of McDonald's to public scrutiny and came down with devastating condemnations of the company, particularly on ethical and environmental issues (see the 'McLibel Support Campaign', with full transcripts of all court documents and lots of background information on all relevant issues).
These are then just some of the most important questions we should be able to answer with regard to any product we buy, if we take seriously the assumption that we shouldn't buy any products which conflict in any way with our own moral, political, environmental and social believes.
1a) Freedom of choice/ Advertising/ Propaganda
This assumption takes its lead from the idea — recently very much promoted by slogans like 'consumer choice', 'the freedom of the consumer' etc. — that we should make all our decisions — whether they concern political decisions such as voting, or our choice for a career or decisions as consumers — as 'ideal citizens', fully and independently informed about all aspects and consequences of these decisions.
Mostly, though, we are not even aware of all this, since the constant propaganda that we consumers are 'kings' or 'in the driving seat', and that all the companies care for is consumer satisfaction has substantially blurred our vision. Advertising is obviously not there to give consumers full and independent information on the product, but just to sell as much of the product as possible in order to boost profits and dividends for shareholders. That is why most advertising in fact has to try to divert from scrutiny of the product, its quality and social and ecological impact. A clear trend in advertising is underlining that: in ads you get less and less information about a product, but more and more attempts to build up consumer loyalty via lifestyle, atmosphere, identification with a certain culture which is supposedly represented by the product in question.[4] Advertising has possibly achieved with even greater efficiency in the area of consumption what Alex Carey, an Australian media analyst, has meticulously shown for the political field:
"It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century."[5]
2. The guiding principles of ethical and ecological consumption
In response to the industry's attempt to prevent consumers to get the relevant information and on the basis of very successful consumer boycott movements (South Africa while under Apartheid, CFC, whales, now genetically modified soya etc.) people started to collect independent information to give consumers the power to buy according to their own ethical, political and environmental believes. This is called ‘ethical consumption’ and often involves a so-called ‘fully-screened approach’ which checks companies against criteria such as pollution, environmental policy, involvement in nuclear power, animal testing, factory farming, oppressive regimes, workers' rights, marketing, armaments and political donations. This allows you as a consumer to 'vote' whenever you buy someting, to cast your vote for fair trade, certain social conditions for workers, for environmentally friendly production etc.
The advantages of such a system are obvious: You don't have to wait for governments to take action on these issues, you can influence the market directly by buying 'good' products and not buying 'bad' ones (it is best to let the companies know the reasons for your choice). This means that democracy in consumption is increased. It also means that you rely as much as you can on independent information and can forget about advertising. Other advantages are the multicultural, non-violent and internationalist dimensions of such decisions, which take all aspects of the production and consumption process into account. Or in the words of Ralph Nader, candidate for the Greens in the 1996 presidential elections in the USA:
"When the consumer finally begins to exercise the virtually untapped power of citizen action — consumers will take their logical place at the head of the economic process."[6]
What is required, though, should ethical consumption or fair trade really work, is a re-orientation of consumers from passive purchasers, who willingly and uncritically accept the advertising messages of the industry, to active, responsible citizens who are prepared to stand up for their rights and views. It is to be expected that industry will fight back in an attempt to safeguard their profits, thus making this task quite difficult. A good example is the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which tries to outlaw and suppress attempts to provide more consumer information (such as ecolabels etc.), on the basis, as they claim, that they obstruct competition. The task then to fight for real choice is particularly difficult in a society where "free access to information" is, in principle, a right which we are granted under the law, but which in reality, as Noam Chomsky has aptly put it, works rather differently:
"In a perfectly functioning capitalist democracy, with no illegitimate abuse of power, freedom will be in effect a kind of commodity; effectively, a person will have as much of it as he can buy." [7]
3. Measuring sustainable consumption: some concrete examples
In a second part I would now like to look at some of the aspects you have to take into account if you want to make sure that the products you buy are really environmentally friendly, to just focus on this one element of ethical consumption.
The reason why this element is so important is that the level and way of current economic production with its worship of 'growth' is simply unsustainable for the future, a view globally accepted at the Rio and Rio+5 conferences. The easiest way to substantiate that claim is to project western consumption levels onto the whole world (which is the ‘hidden’ aim of the current world economy and the worship of ‘growth’): the biosphere can clearly not cope with that. We would need three additional planet Earth to be able to do that. [8] A sustainable action can be defined as follows: "Act in a way that the effects of your actions are compatible with permanent and healthy human life on Earth." [9] Sustainable use, in order words, can only use the interst of the natural capital, but shouldn't touch the capital as such. Defined as such, current levels of polluting air, water and earth, of overexploiting natural resources cannot go on, since it will lead to a collapse of the biosphere. If one considers that the biosphere is actually the life-support system of all forms of life on Earth and that all forms of economic activity inescapably depend on it (and not the other way round as some economists try to make us believe), in other words that the technosphere which consists of all human activity is just a subsystem of the biosphere [10]; bearing that in mind the following rules for sustainable actions can be derived:
a) ecological footprint
In order to bring that down to a practical and measurable level for us consumers Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees have developed a system called 'ecological footprint' which can be used to measure the impact of one's lifestyle or even particular purchases and compare them to a level which would guarantee sustainability for the whole world. [12] What the system essentially does is to calculate the area of land you would need in order to balance out the negative ecological impact our lifestyle has on nature. For example, you calculate the area of forest you would need to absorb the amount of Carbondioxide you produce by driving so and so many miles per annum with your car or by flying to America. The results can then be compared. While for a sustainable level of economic activity every person on Earth would have 1.7 hectares (17'000m2) available, the average British person uses 4.8 hectares (2.8 times too much), the average US-american 8.6 hectares (5 times too much), the average German 4.9 hectares (that is 2.9 times too much) whereas the average Indian uses 0.8 hectares (roughly half of what they 'could'). These calculations give us an indication of the factor by which we have to reduce our ecological footprint in order to become sustainable.
A concrete example might help to understand what is at issue here: A commuter, doing 10 kilometers per day, uses by bike 70 sqm, by bus 310 sqm, but using the car he takes up 1250 sqm, taking all aspects of the various modes of transport into account (use of energy [calories in the case of the cyclist), land, plus land to absorb environmental impact of pollution).
b) the full picture
b1) costing the earth
One of the biggest obstacles to ecologically sound production and consumption is that the costs we pay for services and goods 'lie', that is they do not involve all the costs that would accumulate if ecological damage during production and costs for recycling and/or waste management had to be paid for. That is partly because the traditional (and still most influential) theories of economy simply forget about the resources and waste problem. Just one figure here to illustrate that: each of us in Britain is producing a total of 6.9 tonnes of waste per annum.
It becomes more and more clear that we can only ignore these aspects at our peril. That is why a team of international economists and ecologists have tried to calculate the value (since the leading capitalists only understand anything if it is expressed in terms of Dollars) of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital which we generally exploit without giving a thought. If we had to pay for ecosystem services such as gas, climate and water regulation, water supply, erosion control and sediment retention, soil formation, nutrient cycling, waste treatment, pollination, biological control, refugia, food production, raw materials, genetic resources, recreation and cultural services at market prices, it would cost us, on a conservative estimate, US$33 trillion per year globally. That is 1.8 times the total global gross national product (US$18 trillion per year). Therefore Costanza et al. rightly conclude: "The economies of the Earth would grind to a halt without the services of ecological life-support systems, so in one sense their total value to the economy is infinite." [13]
On a practical level — which again can help you as consumers to reach sound decisions — there are two related concepts which attempt to take the entire social, environmental and other costs of a product into account.
b2) LCA
The first are so-called Life Cycle Analyses (LCA). They try to integrate not only the amount and variety of raw material that is needed to produce certain goods, but also the energy that goes into production (grey energy), the environmental and other costs of packaging, the likely lifespan, the costs for recycling or waste management. Only with a LCA can you really assess whether a product is 'green'. It is on the basis of LCAs that you can see the advantage of recycled paper over virgin paper, of terry nappies over disposables, of glass bottles over aluminium cans etc. Another example is batteries. We through away more than 20,000 tonnes of mixed battery waste each year in the UK alone. 20,000 tonnes of batteries equals 870 semi-trailer truck loads (@ 23t) or in other words an 8 miles nose-to-tail queue of semi-trailer trucks. We throw these batteries away, even though we could know by now that most materials used in batteries are non-renewable, some of them like cadmium scarce, the production of the raw-materials produce significant amounts of Carbondioxide emissions which contribute to Global Warming and Sulfurdioxide which causes Acid Rain. Additionally, Zinc, Manganese Dioxide, Alkaline, Nickel and particularly Cadmium are highly toxic substances which cannot be properly recycled or safely disposed of.[14] So the only environmentally sound answer to this is: wherever possible buy products which do not run on batteries. There are more and more products available which either run off the mains or are mechanically driven, like watches which derive their energy from the movement of your arm or the Freeplay radio which, wound up for 20 seconds, plays for 60 minutes, etc.
Transport, packaging, storage etc. are other factors which very often affect LCAs of a product adversly. In Germany 20% (!) of the entire energy and materials consumption is used to put food onto the table of German families (that includes diesel for traktors, crops for factory farming, energy for the food industry, petrol for long distance lorries, electricity for cooling in supermarkets, energy for cooking, plus infrastructure [pipelines, motorways, factories, lorry fleets etc.]). A single average German joghurt is transported around 8,000 kilometers before it comes onto the table.[15] A single tomato from the canary islands uses 1kWh in energy to be brought to Britain. With that energy you can light an 11W low-energy lightbulb (equivalent to 60W) for 91 hours or 3.8 days, continuously. The answer to this is really to buy local products wherever possible, in the case of food local organic products, since their production uses 50% less energy and materials, compared with similar quantity and quality of conventional agricultural products.[16]
Another interesting example, particularly since it exposes an industry which still is caught up in the frenzy of 'more, faster, higher', are computers. The US-Microelectronics and Computertechnology Corporation (MCC) has calculated that to produce one single PC you need at least 25,000 megajoule of primary energy (=15% of entire [not just electricity] end energy consumption of one UK citizen per annum), you produce 60 kilos of waste, including 25 kilos of toxic waste, and you pollute 33,000 litres of water. That is not even counting the case, keyboard, mouse, diskdrive, mains adapter etc. You might think that is not too bad, but with the average life expectancy for a PC of three to four years, that actually means that a PC is consuming more than 50% of total energy during its production, not its use. And once you stop using it, the next problem arises. A PC is manufactured out of roughly 700 different materials and the way they are manufactured at the moment means that most of these components cannot be recycled and are thrown onto landfills, being partly toxic waste. The dimension of the problem and the irresponsibility of marketing strategies such as Microsoft's to replace Windows 3.1(1) with Windows 95 becomes clear if you bear in mind that for Germany alone that change of operating system meant that within two years about 10 million PCs needed replacing.
b3) 'ecological backpack'/ MIPS
The second concept to assess the overall impact of a product is called 'ecological backpack'. The German scientist Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek has developed this idea, trying to assess what he calls MIPS (i.e. materials intensity per service unit). MIPS takes into account that to produce a tonne of most materials, such as metal, it takes multiple tonnes of ore, hundreds of thousands of liters of water, energy and material for transport, hills and hills of very often toxic overburden from mining which destroys living areas. MIPS sums up the total of material used over a lifecycle to produce a certain amount of a product.[17] A few examples: the 'ecological backpack' of a single car is roughly 15 tonnes, the catalyst alone accounts for 2-3 tonnes because of the platin. A golden wedding ring of 10 grammes produces 3,5 tonnes in the goldmine alone. 1 tonne of coal produces/uses 3 tonnes of overburden and water. 1 litre of orangejuice produces up to 100 kgs of earth- and watermovement. Asf. It is now interesting to compare the impact of various materials, in order to know which ones have a smaller impact. If you buy a fruitplate made from local wood its 'ecological backpack' is likely to be around 4 times heavier than the weight of the plate. If you buy the same plate in copper, the backpack is around a 1000 times heavier than the plate.[18]
b4) integrated costs/ responsibility of producer
If one would take seriously the principle that the producer has to take responsibility for the full lifecycle of a product and that prices should tell the truth about all costs involved from design, raw-material extraction, production, transport, marketing, usage to disposal, the world economy would reorganize itself overnight into regional markets.[19] The reality is somewhat different. There are hundreds of subsidies, most of them environmentally damaging, that distort the prices (e.g. EU agricultural subsidies, subsidies for electricity and cars in the USA, etc.). There are tax advantages for environmentally senseless behaviour (e.g. company cars). In general, it can be said that the costs of environmental, social and health damage caused by, say cars or industry, are externalized, meaning that not the producer or user are paying the costs they created, but the state, i.e. all the taxpayers. Various estimates put the accumulated costs of subsidies, necessary clean ups, follow-on costs, pollution and wasteful use of resources at roughly half of GNP.[20]
If you attempt to calculate the social costs of private cars — costs which have to be shared by the whole population, not just the users who amount to less than 50% of it — you arrive at a figure of around 5% of GNP. Those costs involve accidents, loss of time through traffic jams, pollution and other environmental damage, destruction of roads, land use etc.[21]
Only by making the ones that cause those costs pay for them can markets work properly and make sure that you will face the full costs if you decide to buy environmentally damaging products. On a positive note, it would mean that you would benefit financially if you care to buy environmentally sound products.
4. Guidelines for ethical and ecological consumption
What I have set out above can be summed up in a series of questions which should be asked before every purchase:
This set of questions starts from the assumption that we need a shift in perspective, away from the product towards the service we require. For example, we don't want the washingmachine, we want clean, dry washing; we don't want the car, we want mobility; we don't want the drill, we want to have a picture hanged. So we need to establish first what service we want and then try to find out how this service can be provided in a sustainable manner. In other words: we have to take a fresh and intelligent new look at our needs.[22]
In short: In order to make progress towards a sustainable lifestyle — which we owe both to our children and to poor countries — we need to check how products stand up against the above mentioned criteria of a 'fully-screend' approach.
But ultimately we even have to go one step further: rather than buy new we need to reduce, re-use and recycle. Yet, if we bear in mind that around 50% of all materials used and moved by mankind cannot be recycled,[23] the ultimate challenge is to dematerialise our materialistic lifestyles.
Notes:
Examples: