Green Consumerism Organizations

Advocates of Green Products and Services

Although supportive of environmental issues, many organizations spawned by the U.S. consumer movement of the 1970s—for example, Public Citizen—have tended to focus on public advocacy, paying little attention to green consumers' special concerns. Traditional environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund have been among the major advocates of increasing product sustainability. The Sierra Club gave awards to Honda for its original Insight and Toyota for its Prius. The Environmental Defense Fund has, since 1990, worked with many companies to green their practices, including McDonald's (reducing fast food packaging waste and antibiotic use in chicken), FedEx (with hybrid delivery vans), Wegmans supermarkets (with an ecofriendly farmed [Page 197]shrimp purchasing policy), and S.C. Johnson (using environmental assessment software for product and packaging design).

In addition to its corporate partnerships, the Environmental Defense Fund has advocated for greener products and services by championing market incentive–based government policies—cap-and-trade systems for sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide, and “catch shares” giving fishermen incentives to conserve fish stocks—establishing costs for harms (“negative externalities”) caused by pollution or resource depletion. Under such policies, companies have an economic incentive to green products and services by finding innovative ways to reduce harmful environmental impacts and avoid raising consumer prices. Such schemes mean that consumers need not be informed of products' environmental attributes. Because acting more sustainably actually reduces businesses' costs, more sustainable performance should be reflected in lower prices than those offered by competitors acting less sustainably. Although traditional regulation establishes an upper limit on negative behavior, carefully crafted market-based incentive policies can encourage continued green innovation as companies seek to further reduce costs. However, such market incentive- based policies do increase prices, at least initially.

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