I feel like we have run out of suggestions for easy ways to reduce our carbon footprint. It’s true that actions like participating in meatless Mondays, wearing a sweater instead of turning on your heat, bringing your own coffee mug, or taking public transit do add up, especially if the larger population are all making these small changes. However, if we actually want our planet to be inhabitable for our grandchildren, we need to start making changes bigger than “buy bulk,” or “use a metal straw.”
The greatest power we have is how we spend our money. You hold great authority in choosing what industries and companies to support with your hard-earned cash. By choosing to support companies that are working to reduce their own carbon footprint in major ways, and by boycotting the ones that are not, is how we can potentially save our planet.
I’m going to walk you through a few of the companies I believe we need to ****boycott. Not just avoid every once in a while, but to never give another dollar to again, at least not until they choose to do a complete overhaul of their sustainability models.
Walmart: Small business owners who are selling locally sourced products are closing up shop because they cannot compete with Walmart’s low, predatory prices. These low-cost, low-quality products do not last very long, and are thrown out and replaced at breakneck speeds, generating more trash for landfills and consuming more energy to import more products. By eliminating local businesses Walmart dampens entrepreneurship, and undercuts local suppliers and farmers. As well, by paying employees a meagre minimum wage, Walmart is increasing poverty, and in turn, creating their customer base. A 2016 study published in Social Science Quarterly showed a correlation in U.S. counties between the presence of Walmart and higher poverty rates. When you live under the poverty line, you have less freedom to make environmentally-sustainable choices, which forces you to purchase low-cost goods from monopolies like Walmart.
Amazon: It breaks my heart to write this, because Amazon is so wonderfully convenient: everything you could possibly need is delivered to your doorstep with the click of a button. But that convenience comes at a high price to our planet. Not only is this e-commerce giant running small, local businesses and independent sellers into the ground, treating their employees like robots, and collecting our data, but the same-day delivery Amazon Prime members rave about is causing tremendous harm to our environment. Products coming from further away and needing to arrive at their destination immediately, cuts down the efficiency of delivery trucks, therefore increasing carbon emissions.
Nestlé: Nestlé is the devil in a corporate body. People have been boycotting Nestlé ever since the 1970s, when the company marketed their baby formula to developing nations. Nestlé manipulated customers by claiming their formula was better for infants than breastmilk, when in fact it was a less-healthy and more-expensive alternative to breastmilk. Boycotting this food and beverage manufacturer is extremely difficult because they own over 2,000 brands worldwide. The company’s products were discovered to possibly be sourced from suppliers who use child and slave labour. The fishing industry in Thailand where they source the ingredients for their cat food is notorious for slavery, and the coffee from some Brazilian coffee plantations may include coffee picked by forced labour. As well, some cacao plantations in the Ivory Coast have been shown to use child labour to pick the raw ingredients that may end up in your KitKat bar. Let’s not forget about Nestle’s blatant environmental exploitation of pumping millions of litres of groundwater daily in Ontario and British Columbia for bottled water, paying almost nothing to profit off this finite resource.
Coca Cola: Coca Cola owns 500 different brands and is in every country on Earth, with the exception of North Korea and Cuba. This massive corporation sells 110 billion single-use plastic bottles every year, with that number steadily growing. In 2017, Indian retailers boycotted both Coca Cola and Pepsi because of the substantial amount of water needed for its production, which they claimed contributed to the failure of local farmers’ crops. It takes 400 litres of water to produce one bottle of coke in India, if you take the sugarcane production into account. India has also accused Coca Cola of using pesticide-laced water to make its products.
This is certainly not an all-encompassing list of companies that have committed serious ethical offences. However, I simply do not have the space to write about the sins of companies like Apple, Shell, L’Oreal, and McDonald’s. My fellow Earth-dwellers, I urge you to reconsider doing business with these companies, as the world’s years are severely numbered if we continue to let unethical companies like these have free reign over our planet and our economy.
Image: Kayt Hine/The Cascade
Andrea Sadowski is working towards her BA in Global Development Studies, with a minor in anthropology and Mennonite studies. When she's not sitting in front of her computer, Andrea enjoys climbing mountains, sleeping outside, cooking delicious plant-based food, talking to animals, and dismantling the patriarchy.