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people in an easily accessible way, preferably at the point of purchase. Now O’Rourke has created the GoodGuide, a free online searchable database that allows you to get current data on the environmental, social, and health impacts of more than 75,000 (and growing) everyday products and their parent companies.17 In late 2009, GoodGuide launched its iPhone application that allows shoppers to simply point their phone camera at a product’s bar code and immediately receive environmental and health data on the product, far beyond what any label will reveal. It may look like just another green shopping site, but it’s not. O’Rourke’s goal is “not to help consumers buy less toxic shampoo (although that would be good), but to send market signals up the supply chain to the people making the decisions about what is in these products and how they are made.”18 The GoodGuide has regularly updated information on the companies’ labor practices, corporate policies, energy use, climate impact, pollution track record, and even supply chain policies. It identifies ingredients in products and suggests less toxic or higher-scoring alternative products. Most important, it allows individuals to send messages to the companies behind the products.

When I first got onto the GoodGuide site, I looked up Pantene Pro-V hair conditioner, which I used for years until I found out about the crummy chemicals inside it. On GoodGuide, I read about other reasons not to love the parent company (Procter & Gamble), to whom I then sent a message: “Why does my hair conditioner have toxic chemicals? Why does your company have such a lousy air pollution score? I am not buying this anymore!” One message is easy to ignore, but not thousands. O’Rourke says that “send a message to the manufacturer” is the second-most-clicked button on GoodGuide and that a handful of companies have already switched away from toxic ingredients since receiving overwhelming consumer responses.19

O’Rourke’s project provides all of us massively increased access to information about the supply chains of the products we use, so we can make better choices—better choices for our families, the workers making this Stuff, and the global environment. Some people call this “voting with our dollar.”

While I am a big fan of GoodGuide and recommend we all make a habit of scouring its pages, I also want to add that what’s really needed is to vote with our votes, not just our consumer dollars. Informing and convincing every parent on the planet to use GoodGuide to learn how to avoid toxic chemicals in children’s shampoo is an impossible task, but uniting with a group of parents to lobby to change the laws that allow toxic chemicals in children’s shampoos is possible. That is why I see GoodGuide, and other efforts at promoting supply chain transparency, as great transitional tools. They educate. They inspire. They encourage healthy and fair products and companies over nasty ones. They allow us to send messages up the supply chain to decisions makers to, I hope, inspire change for the better. But ultimately, we must remember—as Allegheny College political science professor Michael Maniates says—the choices available to us as consumers are limited and predetermined by forces outside the shopping market. Those forces can best be changed through social and political activism.20

Trucks and Container Ships and Planes, Oh My!

Ships, trucks, roads, planes, and trains are needed to move Stuff along this globalized supply chain. The transportation infrastructure consumes enormous quantities of fossil fuels and spews out waste, but these are some of the most hidden of externalized costs in consumer goods, and most people are completely unaware of them. Even those shoppers who are aware of the source of the materials in products, the ones who know to ask whether diamonds fueled violence in Africa or whether the cotton fields in Turkey used pesticides, rarely know what to ask about how goods are transported.

For starters, most Stuff imported from Asia comes across the ocean in containers loaded on gigantic barges.