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Environmental writer and panelist Jim Motavalli.
Photo by Jon Zilber

by Jon Zilber
Living Well Session
Fred Kirshenmann, Jim Motavalli, Mindy Pennybacker, and Bob Schildgen: Ten Consumer Choices That Can Change the World

A restaurant menu is also a menu of environmental choices. Your shopping cart is a basket of policy options. What you eat, what you buy, and how you get to the store or the restaurant—these are environmental issues you can act on every day. Not only do your actions have immediate consequences, but you're sending messages to the industries that produce food, household goods, automobiles, and other products.

Every consumer choice is a balancing act: What's used to manufacture the product? How does it get to market? Are fair labor practices followed? What happens when the product is disposed of? It can be dizzying to attempt to keep track of the eco-ramifications of every product. A panel of experts on the universe of the consumer marketplace shared some pointers on the enviro-choices you can make that will have the biggest impact.

The obvious way to make an impact is to make enviro-friendly choices when you shop. But while it's true that money talks, talking talks, too. If a store doesn't carry the kind of products you want, or a particular brand whose eco-practices you trust, tell the store manager. A handful of personal requests are often enough to get the store to carry the products you want. Similarly, restaurants are increasingly aware of the customer's desire for "food stories"—information about where the ingredients came from. Tell the chef or the manager that you want to know what's "under the hood" in the kitchen, and they're likely to listen. And once they commit to sharing this kind of information publicly, they'll be more likely to offer more environmentally palatable choices.

A third of Americans already regularly make at least one green or fair-trade product choice when they visit the supermarket. But, as Sierra Club Books author Jim Motivalli observed, there's often a lack of information available to consumers. For example, while hybrid cars are being loudly marketed by their manufacturers, almost no car buyers are aware that many of the most popular makes and models of conventional automobiles are available in a PZEV version. While these Partial Zero Emission Vehicles cars yield the same fuel efficiency as their conventional cousins, they reduce emissions by as much as 90 percent for as little as $200.

-- 09/10/2005 Sat
11am