If you want to shop ethically this holiday season just buy less, Guelph prof says

While it’s not always easy to shop with workers’ rights, animal welfare and the environment in mind, a University of Guelph professor says many customers want to support products made in Canada, with fair labour, or using environmentally-friendly practices.

But with the holiday shopping season underway, Jing Wan says higher prices for these products could get in the way of people’s goal to shop more ethically.

Wan noted that based on her research most consumers expressed an interest in shopping ethically. But the research also found that market share of ethical products do not reflect what consumers say they want, she said.

“The market share for products that are positioned as more ethical tend to not be the majority of the sales, so there’s clearly a discrepancy here, which kind of leans into this idea of maybe it is kind of difficult to express these values that consumers hold,” Wan told CBC News. 

“I’m not going to call consumers hypocrites or liars. I think people really do believe that they care about these issues. It’s just that in the marketplace, in a store, when you’re confronted with these products, it’s hard to actually pay more for them on the spot.”

Wan explains that ethical production is about benefiting something or someone else other than one’s self — for example helping the environment, helping other people or animals.

She said shopping ethically means trying to find those products rather than the conventional alternative, which typically doesn’t have a lot of information about the production process and tends to be potentially less environmentally friendly, may also engage in animal testing and the manufacturer may not be paying fair wages.

According to Wan, “there’s an ethical premium” that consumers have to pay to help someone else or something else. 

But she said “if you’re looking at almost identical products, and one of them costs more for an attribute, a characteristic that doesn’t directly benefit you, it’s kind of hard in that moment to justify paying more for it.”

Wan said her research has also found that not all products that are sold or labelled as ethical, are indeed actually ethical.

Addressing the issue of higher prices for ethical products, Wan said there is a solution, noting that consumers tend to buy more than they actually need.

“The best way to shop ethically … is actually not to buy as much, simply reduce your purchase. The best thing you can do is to buy less,” she said. 

“People are willing to accept less of a perceived ethical product when it costs the same as a conventional alternative, so that suggests that people are willing to sort of give up quantity for the ethical attribute.”

“And in fact, if we all just sort of accepted that we can purchase less, we don’t need to be purchasing as much as we are currently consuming, that’s really the best way to shop ethically,” added Wan.

Billie-Jo O’Brien and her husband Pete Molloy have been manufacturing eco-friendly soaps, personal care and cleaning products at their Cambridge, Ont., company — Molloys Soap — for the past seven years.

O’Brien said while Molloys Soap is not 100 per cent “zero waste,” they have a strong emphasis on protecting the environment — and this has attracted a lot of their customers.

“We definitely see a 50/50 split where there’s 50 per cent of people that are happy just to shop local and enjoy our products because they’re good products,” O’Brien told CBC K-W.

“But the other 50 per cent of the people specifically shop here because they’re non-toxic and they can refill [their bottles] and they know that it’s a cleaner and better product for their home.”

According to the company’s website, 90 per cent of its products are made in Cambridge in its warehouse, located at the back of its retail store.  It says the ingredients used, and the few finished products purchased, are all sourced within Canada. 

“We definitely try and do our part … Where we can, we package things in cardboard or glass and we have a refill program so our customers can come in and reuse their bottles over and over again, which is very popular,” O’Brien said.

“So, ethically … we always just kind of scale back on the excessiveness of plastic. Even when we’re packaging things to ship, we try and use cardboard or paper rolls versus bubble wrap, that sort of stuff.

“We definitely try and do our part and give people the opportunity to do their part as well,” O’Brien added.

In addition to its Cambridge retail store, O’Brien said Molloys Soap operates an online store and does delivery in Cambridge, Guelph, Puslinch, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ayr and Breslau.