MTV is launching a global marketing push to tackle climate change that includes a TV ad attacking businesses guilty of “greenwash” - deliberately misleading consumers about their eco-credentials.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/sep/11/advertising.marketingandpr

 Source: The Guardian 

Over the last month or so the phones at Ethical Consumer have been hot with journalists looking for evidence that the credit crunch is affecting ethical products particularly badly.  Commonly from the business press, and with an elementary understanding of economics, they tend to assume that ethical products are all expensive luxuries that with falling incomes will be quickly abandoned.  There are a number of reasons why this kind of thinking is wrong.

First, the hard evidence shows that ethical markets are still growing…albeit at a slower rate than in 2007.  More details appear in the latest issue of Ethical Consumer magazine (EC115), where Simon Birch’s Ethical Sceptic column reports on his conversations with some Fairtrade and organic companies about relatively buoyant sales.

Secondly, since we began to systematically research product prices for our research in April, a clear pattern is emerging.  Ethical products are never the cheapest on a market, but neither are they usually the most expensive.  There are usually a group of highly branded premium products at the top end of a price range and supermarket ‘basics’ own-brands at the bottom.  Ethical products tend to sit somewhere in the middle.  

Thirdly it is worth noting that Ethical Consumer magazine is now nearly 20 years old. Those of us with long memories saw exactly these same questions being asked when the last recession began in 1992.  Of course ethical companies saw falling sales – everyone did – but the movement as a whole continued its steady growth throughout this period.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, purchases of greener products only represent a small part of a much more complex trend of growth in responsible consumption behaviours.  You don’t need to be feeling wealthy to boycott products, or indeed to choose to cycle a particular journey rather than drive it.  One sector particularly, ethical procurement by public authorities, is currently growing strongly after a slow start, and is less likely to be affected immediately by economic downturns.

Expecting ethical consumption to disappear in the current recession is particularly crass if you understand the movement as a rational attempt by consumers/citizens to address very real systemic political problems in the world around them.  Issues with global injustice, environmental damage and animal welfare are not going to suddenly disappear because of an economic downturn – if anything things may get worse before they get better.

More to the point, if the greed of unregulated profit-seeking organisations lie at the heart of this particular bursting bubble, the idea that popular movements to bring them under control will give up because the money is tight is to misunderstand the seriousness of global justice campaigners.

Source: Ethical Consumer  

What’s the carbon footprint of your product?

Businesses can from today assess the carbon footprint of their goods and services and play a greater part in fighting climate change, thanks to a new standard launched by BSI British Standards, the Carbon Trust and Defra.

The standard – called PAS 2050 – is a consistent way of counting the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in goods and services throughout their entire life cycle – from sourcing raw materials, through to manufacture, distribution, use and disposal. 

The aim of the new standard is to help businesses move beyond managing the emissions their own processes create and to look at the opportunities for reducing emissions in the design, making and supplying of products.  This will then help businesses make goods or services which are less carbon intensive and ultimately develop new products with lower carbon footprints.

The Carbon Trust has already piloted PAS 2050 with 75 product ranges across a wide range of companies including:  PepsiCo, Boots, Innocent, Marshalls, Tesco, Cadbury, Halifax, Coca Cola, Kimberly Clark, The Co-operative Group, Scottish & Newcastle, Coors Brewers, Müller, British Sugar, ABAgri, Sainsbury’s, Danone, Continental Clothing Company, Colors Fruit, Morphy Richards, Mey Selections and Aggregate Industries.

Some of the results include:

•  
  • For its Botanics shampoo, Boots has redesigned its logistics network so that products could be delivered direct to stores, reducing road miles and packaging.  This alone has reduced the carbon footprint of making the shampoo by 10 per cent.
  • By working with one of its suppliers, Innocent helped identify an opportunity for the supplier to set up a group of employees to look at how they could increase the amount of waste materials being recycled throughout the factory. In the first month, waste to landfill was reduced by 15 per cent, and within six months the reduction reached 54 per cent.

Defra has also carried out research testing of the PAS on up to 100 food products through their production, manufacture and distribution and is studying the greenhouse gas impacts of food preparation and consumption in the home.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said:

“Companies have said they want to be able to count their carbon emissions in a better way, so we have responded.  By looking at where the emissions are being created and reducing them, businesses can also save themselves money. 

“You can’t see or count emissions when you buy a product.  But consumers want to know that emissions are being cut by businesses and this standard will help businesses to do that. 

“In addition to measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of their products, from clothing, to cosmetics and cottage pies, businesses will be able to offer advice to the public about the most environmentally friendly ways to choose, use and dispose of their products.”

Carbon Trust Chief Executive Tom Delay said:

“For the first time, businesses have a robust, consistent standard for measuring the carbon footprint of their goods and services.

“This exciting development will help businesses to really understand the carbon impact of their products and to follow this up with tangible ways to cut carbon emissions across the supply chain.

“The Carbon Trust has been part of this work from the outset and we are delighted that PAS 2050 is now publicly available for any company to use.”

Director of BSI British Standards, Mike Low said:

“PAS 2050 has been developed using BSI’s rigorous consultation process, involving almost a thousand industry experts from within the UK and internationally.  The result is a robust framework within which businesses and public sector bodies will be able to assess the greenhouse gas emissions of their goods and services in a consistent manner.

“Our hope is that it will be used widely by organisations of all sizes and sectors.  PAS 2050 is the latest addition to BSI’s rapidly expanding stable of standards and tools in the area of sustainability and the environment, which enable organisations to manage their operations in a more sustainable manner.”

PAS 2050 will pave the way for business to provide transparent and reliable information on the carbon content of their products.

Source: Defra

A survey carried out by Populus has shown that green consumers feel that Primark is the least ethical high street retailer.  This comes as no surprise after the company was outed by the BBC program Panaroma some months ago which found the company have been using manufactures in India that use child labour for embroidery work.The retailer was forced to stop using 3 of its suppliers as the adverse publicity threatened to bring its amazing growth story of the past decade to a shuddering halt.  Results of the Populus survey showed that the Panorama investigation had dented Primark’s image among consumers.

Nearly 72% of British consumers think ethical production of the clothes they buy is important – up sharply from 59% last year. The findings were published this week according to the latest Ethical Clothing Report from TNS Worldpanel Fashion, conducted in June this year. The most dramatic shift in attitudes occurred among young consumers: Last year 60% of under-25s said they bought the clothes they wanted and didn’t care how they were produced; this year only 36% say they do this.

At the same time people are more sceptical than ever of the ethical claims made by certain retailers and manufacturers: Over half (57%) express such reservations, a significant rise from last year’s 45%, and two thirds (67%) say retailers should use ethical practices across all their ranges, not just such marked as “ethical”.

When it comes to the factors that matter most, an overwhelming 72% of people say an end to child labour and sweat shops is very important, closely followed by offering producers a fair price (59%). While this is in line with last year’s results, consumers have become more concerned about the social impact of clothing production. In a list of criteria that are important to them when it comes to “ethical” clothing, respondents now rate “benefits to the producing community” higher than “no damage to the environment” (49% vs. 43% respectively), while “profits given to charity” and “organic fabric” remain the least important factors at 25% and 17% respectively.

An increasing number of consumers are also prepared to put their money where their mouth is: One third (33%) say they are willing to pay more for ethically produced clothing and footwear.

While one might think of young people as most concerned about ethical and environmental issues, the interest and the demand for ethical clothing is actually highest among consumers over 55. They make up one third (31%) of those who think ethical clothing is “very” or “quite” important, are more sceptical about ethical claims (63% of all 55+) and more willing to pay a bit extra (38% of all 55+) for ethical clothing.

Elaine Giles, Research Manager, TNS Worldpanel Fashion, said: “With the increasing attention brought to ethical issues by the media, awareness of the potential cost to humanity for ‘unethical clothing’ has reached unprecedented levels. Retailers must wake up to this significant consumer demand and increase their efforts to demonstrate their trustworthiness across all their ranges. Consumers will not be convinced by what they perceive to be tokenistic actions. There is a strong need for retailers to communicate their ethical practices more clearly and if they do this well, they can create a real point of difference for themselves that wins consumers’ trust.”

These findings are based on an annual TNS Worldpanel Fashion survey, collating the opinions of 7,000 demographically representative British individuals

Source: Fashion United 

Superfluous bright lights are quickly going out of fashion. A green group will call for a consumer boycott against Prada if the luxury fashion chain fails to dim its illuminated sign boards.

Friends of the Earth said the sign board at Prada’s flagship store in the central business district in Hong Kong was needlessly illuminated from dusk until dawn, the South China Morning Post reported.

The group’s activists in other cities found that Prada’s Beijing store was lit up until at least 4am, while stores in Singapore and Taipei showed more restraint but the signs were still illuminated until 2:30 am.

Hahn Chu, Friends of the Earth’s environmental affairs manager, said Prada showed “no taste at all in this unrestrained quest for brightness. The consequences are a waste of energy and an unnecessary emission of greenhouse gases. If Prada does not stop the light pollution, we will appeal to consumers to boycott it.”

Chu added that a letter has been sent to Prada asking the company to turn off the signs at a reasonable time.

He said: “We have also written to two Beijing-based green groups to ask them to follow up the issue there.”

A Prada spokeswoman said the company was considering its options for the Hong Kong shop. “The exterior lighting is part of our architecture design and we are reviewing options to reduce the lights,” she said.

Source: Fashion United

According to a study from the United Nations which is to be presented today, traditional practices increases yeild by 128 per cent in Afrcia, say UN.To read the study log onto www.un.org 

We are living through two great meltdowns – the credit crunch, and the climate crunch. The heating of the planet is now happening so fast it’s hard to pluck a single event to fix on, but here’s one. By the summer of 2013, the Arctic will be free of ice. How big an event it this?

The Wall Street Crash hadn’t happened for 80 years. The Arctic Crash hasn’t happened for three million years: that’s the last time there was watery emptiness at the top of the world. The Arctic is often described as the canary in the coal mine. As one Arctic researcher put it to me this week: the canary is dead. It’s time to clear the mine, and run.

We now have higher levels of warming gases in the atmosphere than at any point in modern geological history. The last time they were higher than this was during the ecocene, 50 million years ago. Sea levels were 300 feet higher than today, and crocodiles swam at the poles.

So it seems strange that even here in Europe – the continent that has taken the evidence about global warming most seriously – many of our leaders are trying to use the credit crunch as an excuse to drive us deeper into the climate crunch. Last year, all the EU leaders agreed to carry out the bare minimum scientists say we need to prevent catastrophe. By the year 2020, they agreed to a 20 per cent cut in carbon emissions, a 20 per cent rise in energy efficiency, and to get 20 per cent of our energy from renewables. This meant the EU could stroll into the talks for a successor treaty to Kyoto in the strongest position to pressure the world. The continent that gave the world the Enlightenment and modern science was upholding those values – and offering our species the path out of a dead-end.

Until last week. At the EU summit to bail out the banks, several leaders began to quibble about bailing out the climate. The British Government has been trying to punch holes in it, demanding exemptions for aviation and other accounting tricks. The eastern European bloc – led by Polish PM Donald Tusk – said the deal was “too much” during a recession, but they need a Western European country if they’re going to totally break the deal. Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi took a break from finger-printing gypsies to say: “We don’t think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote. We have time.”

But time is exactly what we don’t have. The key to understanding why lies in grasping the difference between a two-degree celcius rise in global temperatures and a three-degree rise. At first glance, neither sounds like a big deal. If you go out for a picnic and the temperature rises by three degrees, you take off your jacket. But if your body heats up one or two degrees, you get sick and take to your bed. If it heats by three degrees and doesn’t go back, you die. The ecosystem isn’t a picnic; it’s more like your body. Small variations in global temperatures have vast consequences. The last Ice Age was only six degrees colder than today. A global rise of just 0.8 degrees has melted the Arctic.

Soon, we will have belched so many warming gases into the atmosphere that a two-degree rise will be locked-in and certain. That condemns Bangladesh and the islands of the South Pacific to drowning. But if we choose, we can stop there, and stabilise the climate at this higher temperature.

But if we go beyond two degrees, the climate begins to unravel, and the brakes won’t work. At three degrees, almost all the world’s ice is gone, and so it stops reflecting a third of the Sun’s ray back into space – making the world hotter. At three degrees, the Amazon rainforest burns down, releasing all its stored carbon – making the world hotter. At three degrees, the Siberian peat-bogs melt and release vast quantities of methane into the atmosphere – making the world hotter. So three degrees turns inexorably to four and five and six. Screw the grandchildren and the polar bears: we’re on course to heat by three degrees in my lifetime. I wish the deniers were right: I’d be on the first plane to Honolulu. But we can’t live for long in an euphoric dream. Two degrees is the point of no return, and we’re about to hit it.

The collision of these two crunches could be a boon. Just as the banking system imploded when it was left unregulated, the current carbon-spewing economy is on course to ecologically implode. The path out of both crunches is the same: concerted state action and re-regulation. To get out of the credit crunch, we need a big package of job creation and economic stimulus. To get out of the climate crunch, we need an army of millions of new workers – and billions in public spending – to insulate every home, construct millions of new renewable energy sources, and work on endless innovations that help us to decarbonise. See any overlap? Europe would get a head-start in green technologies – the great boom-market of the 21st century, if the world sees sense.

The belief we can’t deal with global warming because we need to pursue growth is pulverised by a Stern fact: global warming will smother economic growth. When the British Government commissioned the economist Sir Nicholas Stern to study the economic impact of Weather of Mass Destruction, he found that warming could slash 20 per cent off the global economy in my lifetime – while it costs just 3 per cent of GDP to stop it now. People who won’t stop warming for the sake of growth are like a man who won’t stop his house burning down because he makes a living toasting marshmallows on the flames.

Yes, we could choose business-as-usual. Then, as the climatologist Professor Marty Hoffert says: “Somebody will visit in a few hundred million years and find there were some intelligent beings who lived here for a while, but just couldn’t handle the transition from being hunter-gatherers to high technology.” Feeling pessimistic yet? Don’t be. There is another way.

This is, perversely, a dazzling time to be alive: every human being who ever lives will deal with the decisions we make here. If we disregard the voices of denial, Europe has a chance to do something extraordinary. We could be the people who saw this threat to our species coming and remade our societies to stop it. The story of Europe’s 2020 vision could be heroic, but only if we fight now to save it from the vandals.

Source: The Independent 

Georgina Downs, anti-pesticide campaigner has been voted as the most inspirational pioneer in The Observers Secret Pioneers poll with over 61% of the final vote. She says: “Now is the time for anyone concerned about the health and environmental impacts from pesticide use to contact their MEPs and make their voices heard.”

The Environmental Justice Foundation has successfully ‘outed’ cotton from Uzbekistan and with this made us think about the provenance of cotton.  Wal-Mart has joined the growing list of retailers demanding that their suppliers stop using cotton from Uzbekistan.  It is the first time the retailer has taken such sweeping action over sourcing issues, reflecting its push over the past three years to improve its record on social and environmental sustainability.