Purchase Wisely to Support Sustainable Products
How to use your spending power to support truly eco-friendly products and brands.
Sustainable shopping is becoming more accessible for people wanting to reduce their carbon footprint. Are you interested in becoming a more conscious consumer but unsure about where to begin?
Right off the bat, it's important to understand exactly how to shop for sustainable products and how to be an ethical consumer. Sources like Ovo Energy help us define sustainable shopping as meeting today's needs without hurting future generations and their needs. The idea is only to buy products from renewable resources as often as possible.
Eco-friendly and ethical shopping empowers you to shape your community and the larger world around you by putting pressure on businesses to pursue these values.
Businesses are rushing to capitalize on the shift towards ethical consumerism! According to research by the Harvard Business Review, 50% of CPG (consumer packaged goods) growth from 2013 to 2018 came from sustainable product marketing campaigns.
What makes a brand or product truly eco-friendly?
The eco-friendliness of a brand comes down to three main pillars:
How it's Made
This includes things like recyclable ingredients, renewable materials, and energy/carbon offsets (e.g. a company planting trees to reduce greenhouse gases). If a company is going to claim that a product is eco-friendly it is required by law that this be truthful, and it should include a significant combination of the factors listed above.
Sustainable Product Packaging
Packaging is perhaps the biggest problem facing brands and conscious consumers alike. The heavy use of plastics is the biggest culprit, but other non-biodegradable or non-recyclable materials are also problematic. To combat this, look for packaging that is made from paper, fully compostable, reusable or infinitely recyclable!
Sourcing
Ethical purchases also require some knowledge of sourcing. Are the products you're buying from fairly compensated farmers and makers? Or are they from sources like slave labor? Look for brands that are sourcing from free nations in fair-trade circumstances.
How to Avoid "Greenwashing"
If you've started a journey into becoming an ethical consumer, you may have come across the term "greenwashing". So what does it mean?
Greenwashing is a practice used by some companies to bend or exaggerate how eco-friendly their products are. This could include things like using their own (not credible) green certification emblems, claiming that something is "all-natural" even if the full process of creating the product alters many natural elements, or using plant-based "biodegradable" plastics which don't fully degrade or even reduce to smaller, more harmful pieces of plastic.
So how do you avoid greenwashed products?
Good Housekeeping, a helpful resource for green shopping, recommends starting by looking for official emblems of established 3rd party certifications. This would include organizations like EcoCert Cosmos for organic cosmetics, or Fair Trade Certified for a wide range of products.
Other great ways to avoid greenwashed products include: buying reusable and refillable products, purchasing second-hand textiles, and researching the eco-friendly commitments of companies you buy from.
Bee Wild is a truly eco-friendly, sustainable products and brand
Our mission at Bee Wild Outside is to provide a pure source of eco-friendly products for environmentally-friendly buyers.
We have committed to green practices in each of these areas:
Ingredients/materials
Packaging
Sourcing/energy offsets
Testing & Certifications
Our unique focus on reusability and our passion for the environment drive everything that we do at Bee Wild. Interested in getting to know us better? See our story!
