Fairtrade is a philosophy and a trademark. In buying fairtrade, you pay a reasonable price for goods instead of being greedy, so that suppliers can make a reasonable living. If you can't buy fairtrade, then I reckon next best is to buy from local small businesses, from co-operatives, or buy organic produce; if a crop or product is organic then at least the workers are not being poisoned by chemicals.
Traidcraft sells not only craft goods but also fairly-traded wine delivered to your door.
The Ethical Consumer magazine and its ethiscore ethical shopping guide rate the kindness (or damage) done by buying certain products using a points system. You can go by the total score given but I prefer to look at the detail to help me decide choose whether to buy or not. They also produce a really useful list of alternatives to Amazon to ensure company profits help lower our tax bills.
One wonderfully unique shop is Daisy Daisy, now in Gardner Street, a unique-to-Brighton toy shop specialising in gifts that you will not see in your average high street store, from brightly coloured wooden toys and textured board books to imaginative dressing up sets and room decorations. Toys are categorised into age ranges to help you find what you want quickly.
For food shopping, Infinity Foods
is a Brighton-based workers' co-operative selling a wide range of vegetarian foods, not just local to Brighton but available for you to buy online or local to you.
You can also buy all sorts of fairtrade goodies without financing supermarket corporations by shopping at the good old co-op.
Get expert advice and information for your organic garden from Garden Organic (sorry about the bad grammar), the organic horticulture organisation that started 50 years ago as the Henry Doubleday Research Organisation, HDRA.
I buy by peat-free compost, along with milk and Christmas tins of biscuits, from my milkman, which saves me from having to carry heavy things home.
Leading the field are Freecycle and Freegle, linking people online so they can give stuff they no longer want to other members. I can reach my local groups at myfreecycle and GreenCycle Sussex.
Of course, high street charity shops are the best places for buying second hand because you can fund good causes at the same time. Here in Brighton we also have a local Emmaus community. Emmaus Brighton and Hove which sells furniture and household goods that have been collected, sorted, fixed or improved and sold on by the (otherwise) homeless people who live there. They also grow vegetables for themselves and the cafe they run.
10:10 UK shows you how to save 10% of your emissions in 2010. January's theme tells you all about low energy lights, whether low-energy lights still flicker (no they don't!), can you use them with dimmer switches? (yes!) and just how much mercury is in a bulb?
A co-operative providing phone services and broadband. Choose the Phone co-op as your phone company and buy shares in them at the same time.
Good Energy sells 100% renewable electricity and if you want to generate your own you can sell it to them.
The Big Lemon buses in Brighton run on used cooking oil so they seem to offer the greenest mode of mechanised transport of all, and now they are running buses to festivals like Glastonbury as well. Of course, walking and cycling are best, bus and train aren't bad - see my Travel page - but private motors with one person in on a short journey are the worst of all. Boo to them all.
Janet Elizabeth January 2018