Sustainability as a guiding principle in life!? And no way to find your bearings in this jungle of socio-ecological labels!?
Many people no longer need to be convinced of the need for a sustainable lifestyle. They are already increasingly basing their actions on this principle: they live in an energy-efficient flat with solar panels fitted to the roof. In the garage stands a hybrid diesel car with minimal fuel consumption, and before their holiday flight they voluntarily pay a CO₂ levy.
Yet modern people are not self-sufficient; instead, they buy most of the goods they need for daily life in shops. These range from food and clothing to furniture. Anyone who then wishes to consume in an ethically responsible manner faces a problem: They generally lack any information about the environmental and social conditions under which the goods were produced. It is not a lack of goodwill, but a lack of the necessary knowledge about the ethical quality of the goods. And so, through their purchasing power, they may unwittingly be supporting unsustainable economic practices.
In this situation, attentive customers are met with various labels on the products on the shelves, such as the Fairtrade mark, the FSC mark, the MSC mark, the Blue Angel, and so on. These product-specific environmental and social labels are intended to send the end consumer a credible signal regarding the particular ethical quality of selected goods, thereby solving their information problem. However, the now more than 1,000 labels also present them with a new information problem: what exactly does each label mean in concrete terms? Researching this in every single case is time-consuming. They may even harbour doubts about the credibility of the label. Questions arise such as:
- Can this label be trusted? Is it worth the paper it’s printed on?
- Or is it a case of misleading consumers? Could it be that a charlatan is simply exploiting my willingness to pay a premium?
- Is the significance of an individual label precisely defined?
- What is the point if a product is environmentally friendly but has not been assessed in social terms? Or vice versa?
- Does the higher ethical quality of the product justify the higher price? And who guarantees that the price premium actually reaches those it is intended to help?
- Should we carry a guide through the jungle of labels with us when we go shopping?
Curriculum relevance: This ethos module supports economic and political consumer education. The proposed consumer perspective can be linked to the pupils’ everyday lives. Alternatively – as in other ethos modules – the business perspective could be adopted to broaden pupils’ horizons beyond their own everyday lives. This could involve the manufacturers of goods who, despite cost disadvantages, seek a competitive advantage through social and environmental labels, or the retail sector, which must determine its product range. Possible questions might then include: What proportion of the total product range, turnover and profit do labelled products account for? Are sales staff trained to explain the significance of voluntary product labelling to interested customers? Or are they themselves lacking sufficient guidance in the jungle of social and environmental labels?
Highly recommended: For the Federation of German Consumer Organisations, this ethos module is the ‘Material of the Week’ for consumer education in schools and beyond.
Product Seal Module
Title:
Environmental and social labels: How informative and credible are they? On eliminating information asymmetries in the ethical consumption of goods
Author:
Tim Engartner
Editors:
Thomas Retzmann / Tilman Grammes
Book title:
Product Ethics in Economic and Political Education.
Selected teaching modules from the ethos project.
Special edition for the DSW – German Foundation for the Study of Goods,
Schwalbach/Ts. 2014