Four Different Ways of Voting With Your Wallet

In Ethical Consumer magazine, four ways of buying goods ethically are listed. They are as follows:

• Positive Buying
  This means favouring particular ethical products, such as energy saving lightbulbs.
• Negative Purchasing
  This means avoiding products that you disapprove of, such as battery eggs or gas-guzzling cars.
• Company-Based Purchasing
  This means targeting a business as a whole and avoiding all the products made by one company. For example, the Nestle boycott has targeted all its brands and subsidiaries in a bid to get the company to change the way it markets its baby milk formula across the world.
• Fully-Screened Approach
  This means looking both at companies and at products and evaluating which product is the most ethical overall.

It's interesting that "ethical consumerism" is as much about taking action (buying a sustainable product) as it is about inaction (making a point to not purchase unsustainable goods from unsustainable companies.) The first three are tactics that I employ every day. I buy energy saving light bulbs and things made from recycled and recyclable materials. I stay away from "bad" products like plastic utensils and bottled water. I do not patronize businesses if I am aware that they have questionable practices or product ingredients. The fully-screened approach is the hardest. Because really, just the act of consuming something seems unsustainable, at least at the scale we are right now.