Wallet Mouth

Dr. Bronner’s documentary opens tomorrow

You know how corporate America often leaves a bad taste in your mouth? Wash that ick away (if only temporarily) by viewing the minty-fresh new documentary Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soapbox, which premieres at New York’s Cinema Village tomorrow.

I saw it at the Mill Valley Film Festival last year and was fascinated by the glimpse it provides into the life of Emanuel Bronner, the company’s eccentric founder and the author of those inscrutable soap-bottle screeds. But beyond that, I was blown away by just how seriously the company takes corporate social responsibility. It gives treats its workers really well, uses recycled and sustainable materials for its packaging, gives away an insanely high portion of its earnings to charity, and is a leader in hemp activism, fair trade, and organics.

Bonus: Dr. Bronner’s soap is also completely free of date-rape drug GHB, as Don Bolles, drummer for punk band the Germs, can attest.

All-One!

Hitting the nail on the head

Cole Hardware, my local purveyor of all things useful, publishes a newsletter every month, and the new issue has an article about its attitude on stocking earth-friendly products versus not-so-green goods. Here’s the gist: Cole carries and heavily promotes environmentally responsible items but doesn’t refuse to carry less-green products, since there’s still such a high demand for them.

Meanwhile, the store is doing what it can to showcase the “good” goods in its advertising, signage, and shelving policies. When it comes to garden chemicals, for example, “we do stock all of the usual poisons, but we don’t promote them and we keep them up high or down low on our shelves, giving the non- or less-toxic products the eye-level space.”

It’s also initiating its own in-store labeling campaigns: Green stickers with a “Cole Hardware Earth Friendly” logo are appearing on the price cards for responsible products throughout the shop. And, interestingly, another set of stickers will soon identify goods that are made domestically, a response to what Cole says is the number one request it receives: to minimize the number of products it carries that are not made in the U.S.A. (“If we did, unfortunately, our shelves would be near-empty,” the newsletter states.)

I think this is a good approach to take: Stock the necessary merchandise to meet customer demand and stay profitable, but encourage, educate, and inspire your shoppers to think before they buy, and to buy better.

Ethiscore: Not for the poor

I recently ponied up $30 for a year’s subscription to Ethiscore.org, a British site that aims to help users “quickly and easily identify the best products to support and the worst companies to avoid.”

It’s a neat tool, but it’s far from perfect. There’s no search, for example. (Its sister site, Corporate Critic, which is aimed at institutions rather than individuals, does have search, but it costs nearly $1,800 a year to subscribe.) To access the data in Ethiscore, you scroll through nearly 150 product categories (that’s if you’re a subscriber; otherwise you can only access 15) and select one you’re interested in. That calls up a list of brands, each with a numerical rating on the somewhat nonintuitive scale of 0 to 20 (0 to 4 = very poor, 5 to 9 = poor, 10 to 14 = average, 15 to 20 = good).

The ratings are based on five categories: environment, people, animals, politics, and product sustainability. Much like Alonovo, you can customize how much weight is given to each category based on your preferences. Unlike Alonovo, Ethiscore is not integrated into the shopping experience. It does let you generate shopping lists, though. And it has a cool mail-form feature that lets you email companies and tell them that you like (or don’t like) their practices.

Overall, Ethiscore’s data offering feels a bit limited, both by its selection of product categories and by the number of entries in each category. Only 27 brands are listed under breakfast cereal, for example, many of which I don’t recognize (it doesn’t help, of course, that the site is naturally quite heavily UK-oriented).

Most important, however, is that Ethiscore’s  mission and business model are working at cross-purposes. The information the group provides has the potential to spur real change in the socioeconomic landscape—but only if it’s  easy and convenient for consumers to obtain it and factor it into their everyday buying habits. Charging even a relatively small amount for this data represents a big barrier to a world in which consumers habitually vote with their wallets. But at the same time, it obviously requires considerable time and effort (read: money) to conduct all this research and analysis.

I traded email with one of the researchers at Ethical Consumer Information Systems (the organization behind both Ethiscore and Corporate Critic), asking about this conundrum, and she replied that the organization had always grappled with the problem, and that it was considering becoming a multi-stakeholder cooperative that could bring in “some decent money,” which would enable it to give more information away. “We are also looking into more developments on the internet side of things,” she added. “Watch this space!”

Dental damns

Did you catch the FDA warning about toxic toothpaste a couple weeks ago? I didn’t, thanks to an insanely busy (albeit fun) weekend. But when I fired up my computer this morning, my eye was caught by the New York Times’ interesting follow-up (“FDA Tracked Tainted Drugs, but Trail Went Cold in China”) on the story.

“Provenance” is a word I’m going to be using a lot more from here on out (I’ve also added it to my categories for this blog). The general inability we as consumers have to know the provenance of so many of the things we buy represents a huge problem.

Provenance blindness is the underlying theme of my recent posts on apparel and bedding, but it takes on a whole new urgency when it comes to something like poisonous toothpaste—or tainted food or pet food, also from China. It’s one thing to care about the working conditions of the people who labor in those nameless factories over there; it’s another to realize that our own safety is in danger when we use products of uncertain origin.   

I found an interesting parallel in the toothpaste story with my recent bedding conundrum with Gaiam. In both cases, we have entities refusing to divulge their product sources because they’re worried about being undermined in the marketplace.

So, does global capitalism preclude transparency? Whose job is it to police these supply chains? And if the FDA wasn’t able to find out the origin of toxic products being sold in the U.S., how are we consumers to do so?

0g trans fat = 0g transparency

It makes me smile to think that in just a couple of weeks, New York City’s ban on the use of artificial trans fats in restaurant kitchens will be phased in. But as I continue to ponder that nefarious substance, my brow furrows...

I know this is old news, but it’s so irksome that I just need to vent for a second. Also, I keep finding people who missed the media blitz on this issue and therefore reasonably but mistakenly believe that when a package of cookies or crackers proclaims that it has zero grams of trans fat, it means the product contains no trans fat. It doesn’t. Per the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, 0g actually means .49g or less.

Why is that? I don’t know, but it’s just wrong, and I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Perhaps you’re saying to yourself, half a gram doesn’t sound like much—what’s the big deal? Well, it wouldn’t be if (a) trans fat weren’t so evil (according to the National Academy of Sciences, there’s no safe level of consumption of the stuff—which not only raises bad cholesterol but lowers good cholesterol) and if (b) recommended serving sizes weren’t so out of whack with actual consumption habits. Who eats only a couple Oreos in one sitting, after all?

And as BanTransFats.com points out, there’s also the problem that oftentimes we eat more than one trans-fatty food at a time. So even if you did happen to eat only the serving size of Oreos while hobnobbing at a party, let’s say you also snarfed down one serving each of two other items with “0g” of trans fat. If each one contained 0.49 grams per serving, that would mean you just consumed nigh unto 1.5 grams of trans fat.

In this context, a gram is a pretty fat unit of measure to be rounded down to zero so casually, don’t you think?

Invisible bedfellows

Speaking of Gaiam, while shopping there, I noticed that none of its bedding product descriptions included a brand name. Which is less than shocking, given that things like comforters and sheets belong to that humongous class of objects whose faceless manufacturers bear no relation to whatever brand ultimately gets slapped onto them.

But since the site presents itself in such a green light, I wondered what Gaiam could tell me about where its bedding products come from. The answer is, not a lot. The friendly customer-service rep I got on the phone said that manufacturer names are not shared, lest the competition find out.

So, did he have any idea where, say, Gaiam’s organic cotton sheets were manufactured? “Some are made in India,” he said. “None are made in China, I believe.” Hmm. OK. And were they made in an environmentally sustainable way? “Yes. All organic cotton has to be. You can’t have an organic cotton label if pesticides were used.”

What about working conditions? “Well, that’s one of the most difficult areas to track down,” he said. “We try to participate in the global marketplace in a responsible way, but it’s really hard to know these things. You kind of have to take companies at their word, unless you go there.”

Understandable, but it still sucks.

Keep in mind, he added, that we’re still in the beginning stages of this new emerging global economy, and more and more consumers are starting to demand sustainably produced goods. “As demand picks up, even companies that are lying [about their practices] will be forced to be accountable.”

All right, then. Let’s pick up the pace.

I’ve made my bed and lain in it; now tell me if I should feel guilty

Ever woken up with a feather in your mouth? I have. Can’t recommend it, really.

After one too many downy-lipped morns, I decided it was time to replace our beloved old comforter with one that wasn’t leaking at the seams. The search took a while, mostly because Mr. Wallet Mouth and I discovered how picky we both were, particularly when it came to the puffiness factor.

After trying a couple comforters from über-greeny online store Gaiam, we ended up with one called the Blackburn, by Charter Club, which is just an in-house Macy’s brand; the actual tag on the thing reveals that it’s made by Down Lite International, in Mason, Ohio. The tag also says the shell—which was filled, sewn, and finished in the States—was made in China. Which, of course, makes me start asking all the same questions I was pondering the other day when I witnessed the Marshalls stunt in the subway station.

Down Lite’s website talks about how it’s the premier down bedding manufacturer in America, founded by two brothers who vowed not to compromise on quality and workmanship, yada yada. But that’s about it. So I emailed them asking what their deal is when it comes to corporate social responsibility. I’ll let you know what I find out.