{"id":11221,"date":"2010-02-22T05:00:32","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T12:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/?p=11221"},"modified":"2018-10-18T23:40:30","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T06:40:30","slug":"online-tools-for-mindful-consumerism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/online-tools-for-mindful-consumerism\/","title":{"rendered":"Online Tools for Mindful Consumerism"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For many people, mindful consumerism starts with questioning the desire to buy Stuff. The reason might be to save money or avoid clutter — maybe both. It’s the first part of a journey to differentiate needs from wants and make mindful decisions about where to spend our hard-earned money.<\/p>\n

But at some point, most of us will<\/i> consume. We’ll buy food or clothing or household items. We’ll need to replace something, fix something, or upgrade something. When we make these purchases, we’re playing a role in a process. Much goes into creating a product and getting it on the shelf, though as a consumer, we don’t see that process. We don’t know if the companies involved in bringing it to us have decent working conditions for employees, pollute water systems, or include additives that pose health risks to our families.<\/p>\n

Daniel Goleman, author of E<\/em><\/a>cological Intelligence: The Hidden Impacts of What We Buy<\/a><\/em>, wrote about considering the global effects of our purchases in his essay, Making the Right Choice<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\nAn organic cotton t-shirt may be called “green” because they didn’t use pesticides or chemical fertilizers when growing the cotton. That’s on the good side of the ledger, to be sure, but if we look into the life cycle of the t-shirt, we discover that organic cotton fibers are shorter than other fibers, so you need to grow a lot more cotton per t-shirt. Cotton is typically raised in arid parts of the world, and it’s a very thirsty crop, so a lot of water is implicated in the production of the t-shirt. <\/p>\n

Also, if it’s a colored t-shirt, we have to take into account that textile dyes tend to be carcinogenic. When we consider all these angles, we may come to see that if you change one thing about a product and leave 999 unchanged, it’s not green.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s enough to make the average consumer’s head spin. Most people would like<\/i> to make informed choices and reward companies whose processes make us feel good, but doing this in practice is daunting. If a busy parent is in the grocery store with two children to wrangle, it’s not feasible for that person to stop and trace the life cycles of Cheesy Poufs versus Cheddar Puffs. People can’t be expected to spend hours on the web researching the health, societal, and environmental effects of every purchase. Not gonna happen.<\/p>\n

Technology provides the tools<\/strong><\/i>
\nLuckily, it’s getting easier to know what’s behind a brand. Skin Deep<\/a> and GoodGuide<\/a> are two web databases that provide the backstory on the Stuff we buy.<\/p>\n