User:Ecochyk/Ethical Consumer Group

Ethical Consumer Group

The Ethical Consumer Group is an Australian community-based not-for-profit group set up to help facilitate more sustainable purchasing practices for the everyday consumer. It publishes an annual booklet, the Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping, and the website http://www.ethical.org.au.

The guide lists more than 2500 products available in the supermarket in Australia and ranks them according to the ethical rating and country of ownership of the company that makes them. It also lists a number of issues involved in ethical consumer choices, such as the Australian supermarket duopoly, palm oil and genetic modification of food sources.

In addition to the Guide, the group runs workshops and presentations, community events such as a monthly 'meal and movie' night, and an annual 'household action challenge'.

Assessment

The Ethical Consumer Group assigns each company a strongly positive, slightly positive, neutral, slightly negative, strongly negative or boycott rating according to a variety of criteria. [1]

The assessment is not performed by the group directly but is rather an aggregation of existing information. The sources used are clearly stated on the group’s web site. The group looks for sources that are:

independent and impartial (separate from an organisation’s own claims),
recognised and reputable (not someone's blog site),
systematic and reasonable (have methodology)

Criteria for inclusion of sources:

Broadly relate to company record under the areas of environment, social, animals, and business governance.
Fall into one of three general categories: - external - independent assessment from a third party - voluntary covenant - company signs up to an external agreement  - self-disclosure - own reporting managed by third party
Not older than five years. If sources are dated prior to 2005, they have been included under "information" rather than "praises" or "criticisms" and so do not add in the calculation of the company rating.

Presently assessment sources include information on:

Involvement in defence, uranium, gaming, tobacco, alcohol
Business governance in relation to peers
High or outstanding rating in sustainability indexes/ CSR reporting
Publicly available environmental/sustainability report
Emissions reduction
Packaging & waste
Water management
Awards
Animal testing
Genetic modification
Fairtrade/labour exploitation
Boycott call

History

The group was founded by Nick Ray and Clint Healy in 2004 after they merged their independent efforts to create a similar guide. Since then, they have been joined by Will Oldmeadow (programming), Pradeepa Timmermans (distribution/advertising) and Rosanne Bersten (copy editing, social media) who had also been working on a similar project prior to joining the group.

The organisation’s slogan 'your dollar is you vote, who did you vote for today?' came froma T-shirt seen by Nick in the year 2000 at the September 11 protest against the World Economic Forum. The slogan was adopted as a reminder that the money we spend on our everyday purchasing often endorses various companies, activities and systems that go on behind the scenes. [2]

Similar projects

Sources

[1] http://www.ethical.org.au [2] Interviews with Nick Ray and Clint Healy