The Better World Shopping Guide

Ellis Jones

"I first heard about the Better World Shopping Guide from my boss, actually. His brother is a student at UC Davis; and a professor there, I believe his name is Dr. Jones, wrote the book, and somehow my boss's brother got ahold of it. My boss got ahold of it, and he ordered one for everybody at work.

The Better World Shopping Guide is a small, purse-size book that rates all sorts of manufacturers and stores. It rates them on how the affect the community, how they give back, any chemicals that are involved in their testing, how they treat their employees, how green they are, their effect on the environment, where their resources are from, if it's a country that practices child labor; so it rates them on a grading scale of A to F as to their overall goodness.

I try and be as green as possible. I think it's our responsibility to pay attention to the products we're buying, the companies that are out there, and not supporting those that continue to have bad practice, I guess you'd say. This appeals to me. The layout of this is so simple. I mean you can look for -- let's say you want to find out how your bleach scores. You just go to Cleaning Products; it's right there. If you can't find the heading it'd be under, you go to the back and there's an index.

The hardest change that so far I have not made that at some point I'm gonna have to change, it's the candy I snack on. They think they get a D- or an F; they're actually rated corporate villains, so at some point I'm gonna change that. So far I haven't done that; I've done things like actually the car I already drive is an A, very happy about that. Place I buy my gas is an A-, that was also exciting. I'm trying to change from a normal bank to a credit union, but I wish it could be developed a little bit further and you could go onto a website and kind of get the most updated thing. Hardware stores aren't in there.

But it has so much, and it tells you resource to look for other information, Better Business Bureau, things like that. I think every shopper should have this book, and I am doing my best to put it in the hands of everybody I know. If we're rating this book on a star rating to five: Ten."

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