Wallet Mouth

Happy Father's Day!

It's a strange and wonderful thing to have your first Mother's Day or Father's Day as a parent. Mr. Wallet Mouth and I celebrated his day with a delicious South Indian brunch and some poking around in bookstores. Mini Mouth was remarkably well behaved.

Speaking of the baby, maybe it's because of her that I responded so quickly to a recent email from the Environmental Working Group's Ken Cook appealing for money to help fund the organization's Kid-Safe campaign, which officially launches today. Turns out Cook is also a new parent. "It's my first Father's Day," he wrote, "and we couldn't be more excited, but I definitely don't want a tie covered in stain-proofing chemicals. Instead I want to start fighting for a law that will protect kids from dangerous toxic chemicals, including the stain-proof kind."

So I slung them some cash for an e-card to Mr. Wallet Mouth. Happy Father's Day, and may we look forward to a less-polluted world in the future.

Envious on Earth Day, or, The limits of pocketbook activism

Do you ever feel like you’re in the Twilight Zone? Between learning about all this BPA stuff and finishing the book Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, I’m having a touch of reality disconnect. 

You see, most of the time when I blog about the unsavory side of commerce, it has to do with the environment or labor abuses—stuff that’s “out there”—not physical harm that potentially threatens me personally, as well as my loved ones and most everyone else who lives in the U.S.A. Yet here is Stacy Malkan’s book, a well-written account of how most mainstream cosmetics and personal-care products are contributing to pollution “in here”—inside our bodies, women and men alike—and how nobody is protecting us from this contamination, because the industry polices itself. (And it polices itself without concern for the long-term health effects of chemicals, testing only for short-term things like skin irritation.)

I’ve blogged about this issue before, in the context of the Environmental Working Group’s helpful Skin Deep online database (which is discussed in the book). But as I read the screed, the surreality of the situation really started to sink in. After all, these are normal, familiar products that have been sold on the shelves of normal, familiar stores for years and years. Are we all crazy? 

Thankfully, there’s a reality check: the fact that the European Union has banned scads of chemicals regularly in use in the U.S. (and not just in cosmetics, by the way) through its Cosmetics Directive and REACH legislation—both reflections of Europe’s embrace of the precautionary principle. Why, oh why, can’t the U.S. get hip to this eminently reasonable approach? Here’s where my EU envy starts to kick in with a vengeance (Down, EU envy! Down!). 

Of course, it’s not really about where you are. A couple years ago, I spent an afternoon on a gem of a beach in a Mexican eco-reserve that was stunning—except for the waves of garbage that came in with the tide. My sister, Mr. Wallet Mouth, and I made a game of collecting the trash and putting it in a neat pile on shore so that the people who ran the place could have it taken away. Then we found out from them that there wasn’t any “away” where it could be disposed of. This happens every day, they told us. The litter rides in on currents from places as far away as Australia and China. It was a good reminder that the world isn’t such a big place after all, that you can’t necessarily escape the ills of one region by traveling to another.

It’s the same thing with chemicals. Once they’re let loose in the world, we can’t avoid them—a point Not Just a Pretty Face drives home with its opening anecdote about a 2004 study in which randomly selected newborn babies in the U.S. were found to have hundreds of toxic chemicals in their blood.

So on this Earth Day, I’m contemplating the limits of pocketbook activism. It’s simply not always enough. We need to actively pressure companies to do the right thing and actively pressure our government to strengthen its regulatory muscle to keep us and our environment safe.

Go greener this St. Patrick’s Day

Beer Activist recently hosted a roundup of beer bloggers’ comments on organic brew. It’s interesting reading—and it includes lots of recommendations for organic bottles to try this Saint Patrick’s Day.

Also worth checking out on the site: a piece about the controversy about the “organic” designation in the world of beer. Turns out the U.S. government is allowing non-organic hops to be used. Read on for the details...

Valentine’s Day preparedness, Part 3: condoms with a conscience

Rubber can be a pretty dirty industry. I recently learned that Bridgestone Firestone’s tires come to us thanks to alleged labor exploitation on rubber plantations in Liberia (more info can be found here, here, and here).

I don’t know if most condom brands are made from unethically harvested rubber—that’s a research project for another day—but French Letter’s offerings seem particularly socially responsible: they carry the Fair Deal Trading logo (similar to fair trade) and are made from rubber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

So when Cupid’s arrow strikes this Valentine’s Day, amorous ethical consumers can make their love spread far and wide.

Valentine’s Day preparedness, Part 2: chocolate without a dark backstory

I was going to try to include in this post a summary of the recent history of efforts to clean up the cocoa industry, but that will have to wait till later—it’s too complex.

Also, I just had a baby! Which means my pace of posts is going to slow down for a while.

But in the meantime, get your ethically made chocolate at Divine Chocolate and Sweet Earth Chocolates.

Addendum: Following are more sources of ethical chocolate (thanks, Co-op America!).

Fair Trade Certified chocolate can be found  at health food stores and specialty markets across the country. To find a fair trade retailer near you, visit the TransfairUSA website. If you can't find the brand you want locally, an excellent one-stop online source is the Global Exchange Store.                   

The following companies all sell fair trade chocolate products.  Most (though not all) are also organic:

Dagoba Organic Chocolate - Chocolate bars, baking chips, chocolate syrup, hot chocolate, and baking cocoa (non-alkali).

Dean's Beans - Organic hot cocoa and baking cocoa, also kosher.

Equal Exchange - Organic hot cocoa, baking cocoa (with alkali) and fair trade, gourmet chocolate bars.

Ithaca Fine Chocolates - Organic chocolate "Art Bars."

La Siembra Co-Operative - A Canadian worker-owned co-op. Dark chocolate bars are available in the USA.

Sjaak's Organic Chocolates - All organic and fair trade chocolate bars, gift boxes, holiday items, vegan selections

Theo Chocolate - Organic, fair trade premium chocolate.

Yachana Gourmet - Chocolate, tropical fruit spreads and other food products made from organically grown raw materials from the Amazon rainforest region in Ecuador.

Valentine’s Day preparedness, Part 1: flowers whose ethics don’t stink

What could be more romantic than a dozen roses on February 14th?

Unfortunately, that bouquet starts to smell less sweet when you consider that it was most likely grown using toxic pesticides and handled by workers who probably weren’t given adequate protection against those chemicals. Oh, and those employees could easily have been children, or women illegally required to take a pregnancy test every month (and fired if they get a positive result).

The vast majority of flowers we Americans send our sweeties on Valentine’s Day are imported from Colombia and Ecuador, where it’s common for farms engage in the less-than-fragrant practices mentioned above, plus others. (For more info, check out the International Labor Rights Forum’s Fairness in Flowers campaign. While you’re there, sign the petition telling Dole to stop union-busting at flower farm Fragrancia—the link is in the third sidebar on the right.)

Only within the past couple of years have I been made aware of these ethical considerations. Many people, I think, have no idea. And the biggest U.S. company in the cut-flower industry, FTD, isn’t helping.

If you visit FTD.com, you’ll see that it does have an  “Eco-Friendly” product category. But it looks like nothing more than greenwashing to me. Emblazoned across the webpage is a logo that features a recycling logo and the words “Go Green Living,” along with this meaningless copy:

In an effort to embrace the ever-changing needs of our consumer and our society, FTD proudly presents “Go Green Living.” A movement that is making us aware of the way we have and continue to effect our planet, we recognize the need for natural, fresh, sustainable or organic products to be made available to our customers. Send these stunning bouquets, gourmet treats and gorgeous gifts to not only delight your recipient, but make a statement about the importance of protecting the beautiful earth we inhabit.

I called FTD to ask what, if anything, the Go Green Living designation means. Under what conditions are Go Green flowers grown? Are there publicly available standards I can read? Is this a certification program?

“They are certified sustainable,” the customer-service rep I spoke with said.

“By whom?” I asked.

“Um... [keyboard sounds] It doesn’t say by who,” she replied. “I believe Go Green is a service provided by FTD.”

“But you guys are the ones selling the flowers,” I pointed out. “Of course you’re going to say they’re sustainable.” For a certification system to have any teeth, I added, it has to be operated by an independent party.

The sad thing is that North America does have a highly regarded certification system for sustainable flowers, and I’m sure that FTD’s executives know this. It’s called VeriFlora. Its website discusses its criteria (which span environmental and social responsibility categories), and it’s managed by Scientific Certification Systems, a certification company that specializes in audits across a number of industries.

According to an interesting article on ethical flowers in the new issue of Plenty magazine, about 30 percent of the stems sold by Canada’s largest floral distributor, Sierra Flower Trading, are VeriFlora-certified. Why is FTD lagging?

I told the customer-service rep that I and countless other consumers would love to see FTD offer VeriFlora bouquets. She promised she’d put a recommendation into the company’s system. While you’re at it, tell them to get rid of that Go Green Living nonsense, I added.

So where is a conscious consumer to go for flowers? Here are some options:

Organic Bouquet (the flower arm of eco-boutique Organic Style) has some VeriFlora offerings; a search on the term yielded 43 results.

Even more selection might be found at California Organic Flowers, which sells stems grown in the Golden State that are certified as organic by both the USDA and the more stringent California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF).

Diamond Organics’ floral offerings are also mostly from California, and a company rep told me the flowers are definitely USDA-certified and probably also CCOF-certified organic.

Meanwhile, Flowerbud.com has 22 VeriFlora bouquets, though strangely it doesn’t trumpet that fact very loudly.

Lastly, mainstream 1800flowers.com sells one lonely fair-trade rose bouquet, certified by TransFair USA.

Looking a gift horse in the (wallet) mouth

In thinking about all of last week’s Christmas presents, I realized that most of them probably wouldn’t qualify as being up to snuff when it comes to ethical consumerism. Many were no doubt manufactured in countries with subpar labor standards, or were purchased at big-box retailers or huge department stores that don’t give back to their local communities, or are not organic or fair trade, etc.

This points to the fact that when it comes to many types of popular gift items, ethical concerns are just not on many people’s radar—even people who share the values espoused on this blog.

I think that’s because it takes a long time for humans to internalize such issues. Time, and repeated exposure to succinct messages. Remember the “Give a Hoot! Don't Pollute” campaign?

Interestingly, that internalization process has happened in a big way with one large product category: food. But think about it. We’ve had years of exposure to various food labels. In the U.S., the law mandating the Nutrition Facts chart was passed in 1990. A variety of certification logos—mostly for organics but also for standards like Dolphin Safe—have been stamped onto edible products for years and are now ubiquitous. Then there are farmers’ markets and restaurant trends emphasizing seasonal ingredients and sustainable practices. 

Of course, one reason for the widespread lack of consideration of the responsibility (or irresponsibility) of non-food products is the fact that third-party certifications simply don’t exist for most of those items like they do for comestibles. That said, there are still plenty ways to align your ethics with your purchasing, many of which I’ve discussed on this site (check out the “Shopping with a Conscience” category, or the research resources on my Tools for Consumers list). But they’re not all available to everyone, and they’re not mainstream. Yet.

Call it new year’s optimism, but I have a feeling that consciousness around these issues isn’t going to take as long to penetrate consensus reality as the environmentally friendly food movement did. In fact, I think the momentum created by that movement has produced the conditions for a tipping point in consumer attitudes about all the other stuff we buy. Time will tell...

What’s really scary about Halloween

Pumpkins are sprouting up on front steps, and synthetic spiderwebs are spreading throughout windows and doorways in my neighborhood. In a week, trick-or-treaters will blanket the area to collect all manner of sugary confections. But just as Halloween has a dark side (from its origins in warding off evil spirits to such present-day irritants as oversexualized kids’ costumes), so do all those sweets.

Top candy manufacturers such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé—the makers of most of the treats that will fill those bags on All Hallow’s Eve—have long been criticized for sourcing their cocoa from West African producers with unsavory labor practices. Chocolate isn’t the only culprit, of course; social and environmental injustices can lurk behind other ingredients and in other parts of the supply chain as well.

There are some signs of progress: Hershey’s and Nestlé, for example, have signed on to the International Cocoa Initiative, and Hershey’s this year worked with Verité and Business for Social Responsibility to create a code of conduct that addresses fair-labor practices as well as the environment and food safety in all its suppliers. But many conscious consumers are still understandably wary of Big Candy.

Then there’s the health aspect of the annual feeding frenzy; the statistics on childhood obesity today are nothing if not worrying.

In response, some forward-thinking people and organizations have come up with a couple of interesting twists on Halloween. Corey Colwell-Lipson, a mother who was inspired by the households in her Seattle-area neighborhood that gave out non-candy items last year, founded Green Halloween, an initiative that encourages parents hand out healthier edibles (like organic juice boxes) and keepsakes instead of confections. It also advocates for focusing more on costumes and the social aspects of the holiday than the caloric ones. (Thanks to Lonnie for turning me on to this one.)

Meanwhile, Global Exchange is publicizing reverse trick-or-treating, in which costumed kids give fair-trade sweets and informational postcards to the households they’re supposedly hitting up. I tend to share World Changing’s skepticism of just how fun this would actually be for the little tykes, but hey, it’s worth a try.

In any case, I like the fact that so many people are “thinking outside of the candy box” (to quote Green Halloween) this year. Hmm, Mr. Wallet Mouth and I have a bunch of leftover blinky dice we had made as gifts to hand out at Burning Man; perhaps those would make good treats (not for compulsive swallowers, though). At the very least, we’ll have to scare up some fair-trade chocolate.
Mmmm!