Conscious Consumerism: Changing Our Habits Made Easy With These Two Apps
Hello loves, today I am going to be outlining some tools that will help you through your journey into eco-living. When I first decided to change my habits I immediately became overwhelmed and struck with anxiety constantly asking myself "how many videos and articles am I going to have to read in order to do this?" "how can I tell the difference between a terrible company and a not-so-bad company?" Then I remembered I have a device I bring with me everywhere loaded up with all the information in the world, my phone! All of a sudden the task of being a conscious consumer didn't seem so daunting anymore. Aside from the YouTube channels and blogs I follow to keep up with the latest trends in eco-living, I have an Environment tab in my phone equipped with some of the best conscious consumerism apps on the market. Free and easy to use, these apps quickly became my starting point on my eco-journey. For further information, or if you just genuinely hate reading follow the YouTube link below to my HABITS channel for more information on these tools.
Before we get into the apps I should explain what conscious consumerism is and the goal of putting it into practice.
Conscious consumerism can be defined as a vote with your dollars, a vote for ethical practices employed by the companies we rely on for our essential needs and wants. The idea is to reward companies that are responsible, and punish the ones that are not. The values that are upheld with conscious consumerism include:
Fair and ethical treatment of animals and workers
Environmentally safe practices
Most companies... well actually almost all companies fall short of reaching this goal, but some are worse than others and we should start by rewarding companies that do their best to uphold a moral code. This is called Corporate Responsibility, and it is not very popular among any company let alone multi-billion dollar organizations. Nonetheless it is our job as the consumer to push the market towards sustainable practices.
So now let's talk trash... exterminating trash is the goal here.
BUYCOTT
Meant to challenge companies to adhere to the notion of corporate responsibility, Buycott allows the consumer to scan any barcode and find information about the companies ties to different campaigns. The campaigns are designed to show opposition to different social, environment, and political issues and allows the consumer to avoid products from a company and its affiliates based on the practices those companies and their parent companies employ. The campaigns are divided into different categories, and give explanations for each of their initiatives. One of the largest and most important initiatives is the Illusion of choice.
The Illusion of Choice is the facade that the worlds largest companies are competing against one another, when in fact they are all tied to the same 10 companies. This is detrimental because all of these comapnies spend money on anti-labeling campaigns to hide toxic ingredients going into their products, they do not have sustainable practices and in turn contribute to a staggering amount of pollution all over the world, they do not state the true facts in their marketing and advertising campaigns, and
​​manipulate politicians into passing laws that keep them from being held responsible for their environmental impacts. All in all they contribute to the greed and deception in the marketplace and all while tricking the consumer into thinking each company isn't part of the same money making scheme.
Think Dirty
The next app is intended for personal care and hygiene products. Think Dirty reveals just how toxic our beauty products are, yeah the ones we use every single day... It is sad to think that the companies we support with our hard earned money get to poison the environment and us at the same time, but that is the point of this all to change our habits so that doesn't have to be the reality of life. Similarly to Buycott, Think Dirty has 5.5 million unique products loaded into their product bank, and the user can take any personal care product, scan the barcode, and the app gives a health evaluation of the scanned product. Think dirty ranks products based on a scale of 0-10, and most products I have scanned are 9's and 8's. The scale takes into account these three categories on a scale of 0-10 as well:
Carcinogenicity
Developmental & Reproductive Toxicity
Allergies & Immunotoxicities
For more on my experience with Think Dirty visit my YouTube channel for a detailed video outlining the products I scanned.
