Voting With Our Dollars – The Truth About Environmentally Ethical Consumption

We the people have the power to save or destroy our planet with our dollars.  Learn how you can take practical actions to save our planet with environmentally ethical consumption and good consumer choices.

Julie Smith, 9/3/26

This is a summary of Chapter 24, Consumpethics, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

Every single one of us makes choices every day either for or against the beautiful planet that we share, with each other and with the wildlife that also lives here on Earth.  It is our ethical responsibility to make good choices if we care about the long-term wellbeing of our planet, and about leaving it in good condition for future inhabitants.  This includes our descendants and wildlife.

We the people have the power to change the world for the better with responsible consumption.  And, by avoiding spending our money with unethical corporations, we also help the environment, because most of these kinds of companies are also unethical when it comes to the environment.  If we don’t like what they do, what they sell, or the impact of their products on our world, then we can choose not to buy from them.  This is a historical method of changing what we don’t like and it works.  It’s called boycotting.

Millennials are the largest generation on the planet, and stand to inherit the mess we’re leaving them, so they’re an important part of the change we need to see.  A global survey showed that 87%² of millennials believe that the success of a business should be measured in terms of more than just its financial performance.  A Morgan Stanley survey found that millennials are three times as likely to seek employment with a company that is socially and environmentally responsible.³ 

Consumer expectations are higher than ever, and that’s helping to force companies to improve their labelling and lose toxic chemicals in their products.  Consumers are more concerned about products being responsibly sourced and manufactured.  We can bring products and entire companies down with social media, that can spread stories instantly to large numbers of consumers.  It’s our responsibility to use our buying power to pressure companies to aggressively address environmental and social issues.  If we pressure the companies relentlessly and aggressively, they’ll be forced to cut the crap or go out of business, which will help our environment and reduce our carbon emissions.  And since the big companies are the ones who buy the politicians for the most part, the politicians in turn will be forced to drive legislation in a more sustainable direction. 

Summing up, business has a central and critical role in driving sustainability improvements, and we consumers have a central and critical role in driving business.  To change things on our planet for the better, individual people have to change with the needs and requirements of the times, to help progress and change for good, for the future of this country and the world, instead of trying to stick to the past, refusing to change, and dragging the rest of us down in the process.  Stop blaming the government and environmental regulations for all your problems and look in the mirror.  Seriously.  Am I wrong?

Now let’s consider what we buy, other than food, which is already discussed in another blog.  Non-food items abound, and, while irresponsible food can contribute a huge carbon footprint in agriculture and production, most of the toxins that are physically in our homes are from non-food items.  These include things like personal care products, cleaning products and insecticides that poison us when we use them, and then poison the environment when they go down the drain, as discussed in Chapter 14.  Most of these products are unnecessary, presented to us through big corp marketing propaganda.  Look around your home and see what you have, and think about whether you actually need it, or if you even use it. 

We’ve already discussed the absolute necessity of losing toxic pesticides in previous blogs.  If you need Roundup for your flat green lawn, and Roundup is killing wildlife, then is it ethical to have a flat green lawn?  I know my answer.  I think Roundup and the flat green lawns it’s sprayed on should be illegal.  Yet, if you’ll just die without a flat green lawn, then at least avoid toxins that you don’t even need.  Simply pick and eat the dandelions, since they're an awesome source of nutrients, or allow yourself to enjoy the beautiful yellow highlights in your otherwise boring, featureless flat green expanse of wasteland.

The Better World Shopper is a public research organization, which in my opinion is the easiest to follow, and the most accessible to the average consumer.  It undergoes extensive research for more than 2,000 U.S. companies in the following five categories, which expand ethical behavior and responsibility beyond specifically the environment in the following categories: Human Rights, The Environment, Animal Protection, Community Involvement and Social Justice. Of course if you're time-limited with respect to on-line research, you can simply choose to purchase products that you buy regularly, such as groceries, from a locally owned store, many of which are also employee-owned. For more details about that and examples of local stores in the front range of Colorado, check out Chapter 24.

Sadly, there are plenty of big companies that are saying “NO” to ethical behavior and environmental responsibility, and these are obviously companies to avoid spending our money with.  Even in this day and age of transparency and consumer demands to know the social and environmental impacts of the products they buy, the slimier corporations are still trying to greenwash, which is basically an attempt to con the consumer into thinking they’re better than they are with marketing statements that are pure hogwash.  More than 50% of 2,000 corporations surveyed don’t even have a sustainability pledge, and while many corporations seem to have “a concept of a plan”, they haven’t actually done much.

Take Coca Cola, who threatened to withdraw a donation to Grand Canyon National Park when the park lost so much Federal Funding that they had to delay most of their infrastructure work, along with all the other national parks.  So why would they do that?  Because Grand Canyon tried to do the right thing for the environment and eliminate bottled water.  And Coca Cola was pissed because they wouldn’t be selling their Dasani bottled water there anymore, so Grand Canyon was forced to raise the ban.  Again, which is worse, Coca Cola for being a typical greedy scumbag big corp or Grand Canyon for enabling them?  Or the consumers who buy the freaking water in a plastic bottle when they could bring our own bottle and fill it at one of the numerous water filling stations? 

Walmart is one of the worst retail outlets per Better World Shopper, with a website that looks very convincing, but it turns out that on closer examination they’re not really doing much.  Good to know.  A few others that deserve calling out would be Home Depot, who sells a few (very few) sustainable items, yet glosses over the fact that they are selling a huge portion of the toxic pesticides, including Roundup, to homeowners who don’t need it, in support of wildlife decimation.  Same for Ace Hardware.

Amazon may not be one of the worst Online companies, but it’s close with a “D-“ grade per Better World Shopper, on a scale of A to F, closely followed by Facebook with a “D”.  Home Depot isn’t at the bottom of the heap, but they have a low “D” rating.  On Hotels, pretty much all the common chains like Holiday Inn and Holiday Inn Express are just a notch above those listed as the worst, with “D” grades,.  Monsanto gats an “F” overall in the general category that includes all the companies.

Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, was fined $12 million for illegally applying pesticides that were known to be toxic to birds to bird seed.  Really?  And that’s nothing compared to the $2.82 billion in product sales that consumers paid to kill yet more birds.²¹

Microsoft is one of the worst companies, for a good reason.  With them, enough is never enough, as they endlessly cram updates that we don’t need or even want down our throats.  The most recent is AI, which I don’t want or need.  I know it increases file server energy, I’ve done my research just fine without it, and now they’ve upped the annoyance with the newest stupid copilot icon that sits there in my way and constantly offers to write my text for me, as though I can’t think for myself.  The obnoxiousness of it makes me wonder if it’s yet another conscious big corp effort to dumb us down, and get to where we’re so used to these products that we can’t live or think without them so we desperately keep paying them to keep it coming.  And I wonder if Bill Gates, like Elon Musk and their ilk, will ever feel like they’re rich enough as they continue to become richer as they gouge the rest of us.

In California, Tesla’s facility in Fremont had 112 environmental violations, more than any other company.  SpaceX got fined for dumping about 260,000 gallons of wastewater into protected wetlands in Texas.  Tesla has dumped contaminated water into public sewer systems and has repeatedly asked employees to lie to the EPA so they can operate without proper environmental controls.  The main reason Musk supported Trump was to gut environmental regulations as much as possible.  Oh, and Musk companies have brought in at least $15.4 billion in federal contracts over the past decades, while he and his company have been cited in at least 20 government investigations recently.²²  Ethical?  Anything but.  More like psychopathically antienvironmental.

The market for PFAS (Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) was estimated to be $28 billion in 2023. The majority are produced by 12 companies: 3M, AGC Inc., Archroma, Arkema, BASF, Bayer, Chemours, Daikin, Honeywell, Merck Group, Shandong Dongyue Chemical, and Solvay.²³  It looks to me like all the fines and lawsuits these companies pay for are chump change compared to what they make from us paying them to destroy our environment and poison ourselves.

              Monsanto, Solutia and Pharmacia had to pay $35 million to the City of Los Angeles for polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) contamination, and Monsanto also had to pay $160 million to Seattle.  Monsanto was aware of the risk posed by its products and knowingly misled the public, regulators and its own customers about these key facts.²⁴  Glyphosate, the active ingredient in  Roundup, yet another toxic pesticide made by Monsanto, is even showing up in beers and wines.  20 beers, wines and a hard cider were tested and glyphosate showed up in all but one of them.  When we’re spraying 280 million LBS annually in the U.S., it’s no wonder that it’s infiltrated nearly every type of food tested by the FDA, including honey, cereal and ice cream, and it’s even found in rainwater.²⁵

Entire countries have banned the use of glyphosate, in large part because of its link to cancer.²⁹  Mexico is one of those countries, but recently revealed e-mails show that it has faced pressure from Monsanto’s owner to drop its glyphosate ban.³⁰  Plaintiffs in more than 100,000 lawsuits, say they were harmed by the chemical, including a former school groundskeeper who was diagnosed with terminal non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after using Roundup.^31,32

Throughout the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, a number of unethical industries and companies have literally paid unethical scientists to obscure the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, and this continues to this day.³⁴  If they could lose sales in the face of the truth, they’ve beat it back with misinformation time and time again.  They fought the realities of the ozone hole, secondhand smoke, Rachel Carson’s research on pesticides and any other irresponsible concoctions that they were selling at the time.  They even went so far as to link environmentalism with socialism, saying that we’d lose our freedoms in the face of environmental regulations, a stance that the right wing continues to perpetuate. 

Implicated were the usual suspects among big corp and government, such as DuPont, Exxon Mobile, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Reagan, and H.W. Bush, to name just a few.  To this day, they continue to fight the realities of plastics, fertilizers, fossil fuels, population growth, logging, mining, and meat and dairy, and the trashing of our oceans and fisheries, and the fact that Earth’s resources are finite, to name a few.  A sleezy organization called the George C. Marshall Institute was created in the 80’s specifically to create doubt through fake, industry funded studies.  It's no wonder we’re confused.

Environmental pollution is estimated to cause about 9 million premature deaths across the globe annually.  The researchers estimate that 1.8 million of these deaths are from toxic chemicals, an increase of 60% since 2020.⁴⁸  It’s no wonder, with more than 80,000 different toxic petrochemicals on the market in the U.S. alone, used in everything from perfumes and household cleaners to fertilizers and industrial solvents.⁴⁷  It seems to me that we’ve gone ape-shit crazy over the concept of “better living through chemistry” in the past few decades.  I’m glad my chemical engineering path didn’t lead me to a cushy job at a chemical manufacturing plant.  While it probably would have been fun, I’d be feeling really guilty about now.

I hope you now have a better sense of how our personal spending and buying habits can either help our planet or contribute to its demise.  While it’s certainly confusing to look at all the products and all the different companies out there, I offer the following advice, for what it’s worth.

·       Buy local as much as possible, from local companies and venders.

·       Buy products that are as simple as possible.  Avoid processed foods.

·       Buy organic.  If you buy from local producers, organic products may not necessarily be certified, so ask the vender.

·       When buying meat, make sure it’s certified as responsible.  There are many different certifications, depending on the meat.

·       For cleaning and personal care products, only buy responsible brands that list their ingredients on the labels.  That’s a lot easier than digging into chemicals and MSDS’s.

·       Use the “Better World”⁴ website to find out how national businesses and brands stack up as far as ethics and responsibility.