I do try to check where things are made, avoid known bastards, buy free range eggs etc but it's more or less impossible to be wholly ethical without going full survivalist mentalist.

I do what I can, and change my habits as I learn. On the permanent boycott list are Nestle, Coca Cola, anything belonging to Rupert Murdoch (Times, Sky TV, etc.), and Dyson. On the "avoid if possible list" are Sony and Apple.

I've also been vegetarian for coming up to 11 years now, and have recently decided to go "vegan for breakfast", so basically I've swapped out milk for one of the plant based alternatives on my cereal. This is for environmental reasons, rather than purely ethical. Reducing the cruelty to animals that my diet causes is a nice bonus after effect to reducing my CO2 footprint, essentially.

What's the problem with Dyson? I don't have anything by them, just wondering.

Isn’t Nestle boycotting effectively impossible because they own so much of the supply chain even on stuff where they aren’t in the label?

Don’t quite know what I’m on about. I’ll try and dig up the article I read but it was years ago.

monkey wrote:

Isn’t Nestle boycotting effectively impossible because they own so much of the supply chain even on stuff where they aren’t in the label?

Even if thats true, avoiding their branded bits will have some impact.

I go through phases. Mostly try and boycott Israeli products. Used to boycott companies that support Israel too but then I wouldn’t ever be buying much.

I try my best. There's a reasonably long list of companies I'm boycotting either for personal slights or wider societal issues. Including WHSmith, Sports Direct (so many reasons for that one) Dyson, the Sun, Sky (directly anyway), and any form of ridiculous packaging including use once coffee pods.

I've no issues at all with Amazon. A wonderful company.

Definitely put me in the lazy, selfish, excuse making hypocrite camp. I'd love to be an ethically sound consumer, but the limits it would put on me to become one, the inconveniences, expenses, the amount of research with contradictory arguments to wade through etc. only to get myself into a position where I can finally say I'm ok and doing my bit but not making a blind bit of difference to the overall situation does not appeal to me.

It's the kind of shit governments are supposed to collaborate on and solve, you can't do much as an individual. Can you?

The most recent South Park has made me question using amazon.

I can’t remember where I read it recently but there was a very depressing article about meat consumption and the pointless global ethics of voluntary vegetarianism and veganism. Effectively the food industry all so propped up by subsidies and deals with countries and governments that anyone choosing to go vegetarian or vegan makes no dent in the matter at all. It would require legislature and a massive structural reform of the entire system to enforce a reduction in meat consumption to even begin to undo the negative effects that it’s had on the planet. Thinking about it, it might have been something Rouj posted.

Vela wrote:

Blue Swirl wrote:

This is for environmental reasons, rather than purely ethical. Reducing the cruelty to animals that my diet causes is a nice bonus after effect to reducing my CO2 footprint, essentially.

Is it though? The ethical reasons are well known, I have no quarrel there. But environmental claims that vegetarian diet alone is better is not entirely true. Sure, there are less CO2 emissions than cow bums, but what about the ecological impact of monocultures, pesticides, herbicides and land clearing? That has surely driven many species to the brink or beyond of extinction. Flying over hundreds of continuous kilometres of grain crop really drives home how little room is left for native flora and fauna.

See, this is one of the main issues I have with the whole concept of ethical consumerism. You try and do something right and then someone tells you that it's still wrong, and then you don't know which information is more accurate or are left doing constant research into every company and item you want to buy.

At that point the question is whether it's really our responsibility as individuals to know all this stuff and make personal decisions to try and mitigate negative effects. I can see why some people would go, 'You know what? Fuck it.'

I don't think that's OK, of course, but it's a reasonable response to being asked to know and make judgements about all this stuff, which should really be decided at a higher level - nationally or even globally.

So, FWIW, I certainly have personal ethical lines that I don't cross, such as buying free range eggs, but I can't pretend to be consistent with every decision I make. In a way it's hypocritical, but it also comes down to what I can afford or whether I think the alternative option is clearly better. Mostly, what I prefer to do is simply consume less - to not buy anything I either don't need or won't use - to reduce waste and overall support for a system built on exploitation and cruelty.

The other thing to do is look out for actual campaigns to boycott certain things that have clear goals, such as the BDS campaign against goods from Israeli settlements. When those sorts of things take off they can put pressure on companies and politicians. More generally, I think it's about making these things political issues and refusing the idea that they are simply personal ethical choices. Less about choosing fair trade over the other brand and more a question of why there's an 'unfair trade' choice on the shelf to begin with.

One thing I will say, I'll never look at a plastic straw the same way again after seeing a video of one being removed with pliers from a turtle's nostril.

WorKid wrote:

They had to fight to get some places to serve them!

The canteen lady at my work refuses to give me my egg/sausage/bacon softie in just the napkin, she says it has to go in a cardboard box.

I’d love to be able to take my glass stopper bottles to Tesco, and have them filled up with the milk and concentrated squash I buy, rather than the plastic bottles.

I don’t understand why raw meat has to be sold in rigid containers four times the size of the meat they contain.

Someone should tell the turtles cocaine is unethical.