Choice: the curse of the green consumer?

Ethical consumerism is booming as never before. But is its very success making it redundant? Andrew Purvis investigates.

“When Fairtrade cotton came on the market, you couldn’t get the bloody stuff,” says Paul Monaghan, head of ethics and sustainable development at the Co-operative Group. “M&S went out and bought the whole lot. When Fairtrade roses came out, Sainsbury’s got them. We were all fighting over the roses.”

It’s hardly a becoming image, corporate buyers scrapping over the world’s meagre supply of fairly traded flowers - but it gives a sense of how voracious the market is. In 2004, says the Co-op Bank’s Ethical Consumerism Report, sales of everything from Fairtrade cotton to ethical pensions saw unprecedented growth. Some are now firmly lodged in the mainstream.

But while the overall statistics are impressive, ethical purchases remain a small fraction of our overall spend - even after Make Poverty History, Live 8 and It’s Not Easy Being Green. “Generally, it’s a 3-5% market share,” says Monaghan, adding that it might be possible for it to reach around 7-10% in the next few years.

“There’s more certified bird-friendly, forest-grown coffee brands than you can shake a latte at.”

In short, even the most optimistic forecasts see ethical consumerism stuck in a tiny niche in the vast architecture of its unsustainable opposite. “There’s certainly one argument,” says Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at Surrey University, “that it’s no more than the salving of guilty middle-class consciences in the face of consumption patterns that are almost completely unethical. People are consuming just as much energy, they’re buying all this stuff, their income is still just as high - but they’re buying Fairtrade coffee as well, so it’s alright.”

The babble of an ethical conscience may be rising, but it’s drowned out by the high-decibel din of mainstream consumerism. “That is the massively strong driving force in our society,” says Jackson. “The structural imperative for companies to keep selling things, the need for consumers to keep buying them, the rewarding of high-consumption behaviour both socially and psychologically.”

So if only one tenth of products are ethical, can people who buy Green & Black’s chocolate be doing anything more than blowing bubbles of goodwill in the face of a hurricane? Are all their well-intentioned efforts really making the slightest difference?

Jackson is sceptical. “This idea that you can just rely on consumers to exercise choice and become more ethical doesn’t stack up. Far from placing all the responsibility on individuals to make ethical choices, you [should] systematically and progressively remove unethical choices from the market - and that, partially at least, is the role of government.”

“What’s needed isn’t a fair trade frenzy, but mainstream standards that make ethical the norm.”

What’s needed now is not a Fairtrade frenzy to grow the socially responsible niche, but a more concerted effort by industry and government to ratchet up mainstream standards so that ethical becomes the norm. In effect, this means editing out unethical options: reducing choice in pursuit of the greater good, so that ethical products are the default purchase rather than a conscious option. Such ‘choice editing’, to use the new buzzword, is gaining increasing support among forward thinking retailers, as well as policy makers.

“All ethical consumerism does,” says Paul Monaghan, “is send a signal about what is possible. It allows corporates and consumers to experiment. But we can’t wait 50 years for it all to go mainstream. At some point, when it hits the highest level possible, intervention is needed.” Lead-free petrol was a voluntary choice, he says, until it reached a threshold. “The government decided ethical consumerism would not deliver 100% lead-free petrol - so it made it illegal.”

In similar fashion, he believes, the less energy-efficient kitchen appliances (graded C, D and E) should be banned - along with incandescent bulbs. “What purpose do they serve? While Sainsbury’s is selling ten standard bulbs for a quid, there will always be sizeable numbers of people who will not buy an energy-efficient light bulb for £3.”

Campaigner Matt Prescott feels so strongly on the matter that he’s set up a website: www.banthebulb.org. Quoting US figures which suggest that spending $450 million on low-energy light bulbs saves $1.8 billion in reduced electricity demand and carbon emissions, he asks: “Why not just ban incandescent bulbs - why not make them illegal?” At the very least, he thinks consumer resistance to high prices could be overcome by imposing a £1 tax on every standard light bulb. “The revenues could then be used to subsidise the price of energy-saving bulbs,” he says, “or to promote energy efficiency generally.”

It sounds drastic, not to say draconian - but, contrary to all our assumptions about wanting choice at any price, it could be a far more popular approach than we’d imagine.

“If you go to a fish shop, there’s a whole range of fish - and if there’s no cod, you can’t buy cod. End of story really.”

According to a new report, I Will if You Will, published by the Sustainable Consumption Roundtable, most shoppers believe it is the role of government to remove dangerous or unethical items from sale. A typical example would be endangered fish species, like cod. In the words of one consumer forum member, “If you go to a fish shop, there’s a whole range of fish - and if there’s no cod, you can’t buy cod. End of story really.” This echoed the findings of a 2005 MORI poll for the National Consumer Council, in which 74% of those surveyed believed in a ban.

Marks & Spencer is so convinced by choice editing that it’s made it a central plank of its marketing strategy. “Our customers know that, if they shop at M&S, we’ll have done all the hard work for them,” says Mike Barry, head of corporate social responsibility. “They’re interested in ethical issues, but they just want us to get on and manage them; they want to come into our stores and enjoy shopping, knowing that, behind the scenes, we’ll have done all the right things.”

Choice Editing

“We’re not going to offer a few ethical products tokenistically on the edges of our stores,” he says. “We’re going to drive this hard.” M&S’s ‘core standards’ ensure it only sells free-range eggs, has banished hydrogenated fats (linked to heart disease) and sources all its fish from sustainable stocks. “Our customers expect high basic standards,” says Barry, “and in some areas they want us to give them the absolute gold standard.” One example is coffee and tea, where all 38 lines are going Fairtrade this year, eliminating the need for choice. On the surface, that looks like total capitulation to the ethical consumer.

“Half the British population does business with M&S at some point every year,” says Barry, “and they are telling us they want this. So we think we are chasing not 5% of the British marketplace, but the 80 or 90% who want high basic standards for every single product. What we’ve done is look at the market research, the focus groups, the way the media is playing it, the way the NGOs are playing it, and then transected all those issues. We’ve worked out what customers are beginning to tell us, anticipated it, then gone out and given them what they want.”

M&S’s rising profits would seem to back up the business case for choice editing. But does that mean the individual ethical consumer is redundant? Despite his belief in intervention, Tim Jackson thinks not: “The idea that consumers have the power to change things, and shake up shareholders by their purchasing decisions, shouldn’t be let go of lightly. People made ethical choices around boycotting Shell in the mid-1990s, and that had a big impact on the market at the time - and on Shell.” Clare Allman, UK marketing manager of Ecover, the green cleaning products group, believes in people power, too. But, she cautions: “We - the companies, the NGOs and others involved - need to educate [people]. We have to make them savvy enough to know what ecological means. Then they can go to companies and ask the right questions: ‘What are your principles? How are your products made? What else do you do?’”

It sounds a lot to ask of the humble shopper. But in a world where ethical products, logos and labels are being launched every day, an enquiring mind certainly helps. Already, there are 44,000 organic products endorsed by the Soil Association and 1,500 carrying the Fairtrade mark. Then there’s Rainforest Alliance coffee, cocoa, bananas, orange juice; Kaoka and Rapunzel ‘organic and fair’ chocolate bars, and more certified bird-friendly, forest-grown coffee than you can shake a latte at. Even Starbucks is in on the act...

More confusingly still, the demand for ‘ethical’ products is stretching most people’s definitions of the word. In the US, the Native Tobacco Project is developing what it says is the world’s first fairly traded cigarette. Tobacco grown by the poor farmers of Malawi, who often receive less than the cost of production for their crop, is being sold at a fair price to Native Americans - historically oppressed, maybe, but exempt from certain taxes and long renowned for producing cigarettes at a competitive price. “The profits will help the Malawi farmers diversify,” says the project’s Paul Irwin, “so ultimately they may get out of tobacco entirely” - a perverse but doubly ethical outcome. “The Native Americans will be able to move into other manufacturing and service industries, while consumers will benefit, for a while at least, from a high-quality, natural cigarette with tobacco as its sole ingredient.”

Redefining philanthropy

It’s enough to send Nick Robins, head of socially responsible investments (SRI) at Henderson Global Investment, spinning in his revolving office chair. Tobacco companies, no matter how ethical, will never appear in his investors’ portfolios. “Ethical investment is the default choice here,” he says, “that’s what you get if you come to us” - another example of choice editing. While SRI pension funds are booming generally (set to achieve a market share of 15% by 2009, according to Morgan Stanley), Robins has seen some interesting developments at the very top end of the market.

“There’s a realignment among the super-wealthy, the high-net-worth individuals who have earned the money through enterprise or inherited it,” he says. “There’s a real tidal wave of sustainability rolling through that community - a huge amount of interest in businesses linked to environmental and social progress, in renewable energy, micro-finance and water-conserving technologies.” It’s a contrast to the slower, more ‘reformist’ model of SRI, which is more around engaging with companies across a broad range of business areas. “These people are cutting straight through that and going directly to solutions.”

“It’s an interesting twist, millionaires becoming ethical consumers in order to make even more money.”

It’s an interesting twist, millionaires becoming ethical consumers in order to make even more money - though Nick Robins sees it differently. “It’s a kind of noblesse oblige,” he reckons, “a redefinition of philanthropy. Because a lot of these people made their money through enterprise, they want to give back through enterprise. There’s this whole rethinking of the philanthropic space, and part of it is saying, ‘Maybe we can achieve social and environmental progress through the investments we make, as well as just through grant donation and giving it away.’”

It’s not exactly a new idea, of course. Quaker businesses such as Cadbury were pursuing broadly the same goal over a century ago. Now, in a gesture that may be as expedient as it is enlightened, Cadbury Schweppes (purveyor of Bubbas gum, Dairy Milk bars and Dr Pepper) has appointed David Croft, former champion of Fairtrade at the Co-op, as its global director of ethical sourcing. So how does he see the future of ethical consumerism? “It’s not just a question of stepping up product lines,” he says - by which he means those labelled Fairtrade or organic - including, incidentally, Green & Black’s, which Cadbury recently acquired. Nor does he anticipate choice editing or any kind of robust government intervention. The solution, he believes, is transforming businesses from the inside out and making them ethical in the Quaker mould. He talks of deep-seated engagement with the cocoa-growing communities in Ghana who supply some of Cadbury’s raw material. The company is not only educating farmers about better agricultural practices and providing them with pest-resistant hybrids to produce higher yields. It’s also working alongside Water Aid to provide 400 wells for the farming villages, and its employees are contributing books for schoolchildren.

“Our target is to look beyond the 10,000 farmers who receive the Fairtrade premium,” says Croft, “and extend that kind of value to perhaps half a million farmers in Ghana who don’t. That is the real challenge.”

Ethical top ten Britain’s best selling ethical products

• Lead-free petrol, catalytic converters, condensing boilers - 100% market share soon. Driver: choice editing, partial or total ban on new products.
• Dolphin-friendly tuna - 90%. Driver: NGOs and campaigners raising awareness through media.
• A-rated, energy-efficient washing machines - 85%. Driver: manufacturers’ agreement to raise minimum standards, EEC price incentives, choice editing by retailers.
• A-rated cold appliances (fridges, freezers) - 76%. Driver: as above.
• Recycled content in newspaper - 75%. Driver: industry-led initiative, little consumer awareness.
• A-rated dishwashers - 74%. Driver: see washing machines.
• Free-range and barn eggs - 40%. Driver: perceived benefits of freshness, taste, animal welfare; collective memory of the Edwina Currie debacle.
• Fairtrade coffee - 20% of ground coffee market. Driver: wide choice equal to competition, price differential within the norm.
• Low-energy light bulbs - 13% (by 2020). Barrier: poor design and performance relative to price, compared to tungsten bulbs.
• Organic products - 1.2% in 2004. Barrier: perceived benefits do not justify price. Marketed as luxury niche product.

Source: ‘I Will if You Will’, published by the Sustainable Consumption Roundtable 

2005 - the year of living ethically

Andrew Purvis is principal investigative writer on food issues for the Observer food Monthly.

8 July 2006