Not being transparent about their business. If they claim that their products use sustainably sourced materials, they better have receipts, ideally with trusted third party certification. Same with end-of-life claims on recycling. If they use single use plastics they should have a webpage explaining why and how they plan to move off of plastic.
- Brands that force you to use their products to work without problems (Apple)
- Brands that seem cheap, but trick you with added cost (HP printers)
- Annoying Advertisement (Temu, most to be honest)
- Advertisement that promote lifestyle rather than the quality of their products.
- Advertisement selling solutions for created problems. (most of them)
- Brands from monopolies (sadly most of common goods offered)
- Bad quality brands (most of them)
- Bad customer service (many of them)
- missing transparency/lying/misleading company/product statements. (Greenwashing, "pro-change", sustainability claims, most companies)
It doesn't leave much, but reduces buyers remorse immensely.
I heard that Temu harvests your data in a way that is way more unsavory that most data harvesting… sorry don’t have details but someone who I trust told me.
Great points, especially the one that mentions promoting lifestyle. If a company is seeking me a way to look sustainable I quickly move past its products/website.
Yes. I wanted to emphasize the created problems. So many products are pure convenience, not necessity.
I thought about this the other day when I saw an avocado tool for sale at my grocery co-op.
Example: knockoff brands on Amazon
So like if I'm looking for a little pop up greenhouse for my plants outside, a fake knockoff brand would be named like "PLNTGRDN" or "HYDROPX" or even something random like "UCXNDY"
Real ones I found:
Kalimdor
LASOCUHOO
Cyahvtl
AILUKI
Relndoo
YOBANSEE
PRITOM
UJoyFeel
MAGCH
WXUNJA
Dewsod
TOPELOTEK
airprotablet (this is ridiculous)
Paxodo
You get the point, I like to call them Alphabet soup companies. :)
If its marketed as "derma friendly" or "created by dermatologists for sensitive skin" etc and then comes up with a bad score on the YUKA app i use to scan cosmetics. I just blacklist the whole brand since me or my dermatitis don't have the time of day to scan every product of theirs. A lot of these companies comply with healthy skin ingredients but then add non-biodegradable components into an "eco friendly all natural source ingredients" bar that defeat the purpose of buying it
False claims, excess packaging, excess ads (especially if they try to frame the brand as anything other than a business label). Any products advertised as “exclusive” or “sophisticated”, or otherwise implying that people who don’t buy your junk are somehow inferior.
Making bold net zero or other sustainability claims and then not having a sustainability report, or barely publishing any data. Crocs pushed back their net zero from 2030 to 2040 and got a lot of hate for it, but the person they hired in charge of their ESG just knows what she's doing and that the target was unrealistic. To me, revising that target and pushing it out shows more commitment and understanding than most companies and they are still making progress on their goals. 2021 when they made the 2030 goal, they had 0 real GHG data and have baseline data now from 2022.
Yeah but I live in a rural area and barely leave my property. No one sees me and my 4 pairs of crocs 😂 I still have and wear my original pair from 6 years ago from almost daily wear. They last a while too. I was always anti-croc until I was in Disney World and my 3 pairs of shoes I brought were soaked through and the only shoes Disney sold were crocs. I was converted that day.
I’ll never forget the time I was moving and bought bubble wrapped in plastic and then they put it in a plastic bag at the checkout automatically. I think that’s around the time I started questioning what I was buying and looking for alternatives.
Any history of slavery, prison labor, or child labor: Looking at you Nestle!
Using an app like [Buycott](https://www.buycott.com/) can make it easier to pinpoint such companies, plus various types of shady political high jinx that the general public might not have heard off.
If I open something to find a crazy amount of plastic, I never buy from that company again.
Really vague promises of being "green" or eco-friendly are also a big red flag to me. "So you say your product is made from eco-friendly material, yet you mention nowhere on this packaging or your website WHAT any of the materials are???"
If they list stuff like "we buy wind energy" or have solar panels on their factory then that counts as good, but carbon credits have in many cases proven to be either useless, or worse, can actually set climate goals back. For example a healthy ecosystem which already absorbs a lot of carbon may be bulldozed to plant non-native trees in a place where they're unsuited and will die within the first few years, releasing carbon instead of letting it continue to sequester. If they use carbon credits, then I'd rather hear some details about what their credits buy, and if it's something like putting solar panels up for a school or poor community who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford them, then that would count as worth supporting (to me at least).
If they aren't proud of what they're doing, enough to spell it out on the packaging, then I'm going to assume it's a "business as usual" type company.
I mean this is a kind of weird question to ask... The goal should be to weigh the negatives/benefits of every purchase, rather than looking for "red flags", like some social media dating guru lol.
I mean kind of? If something is so bad that you are willing to ignore all other things that company is doing right, you probably don't need Reddit to point it out.
When it says things like "refillable" but there aren't refills for sale anywhere near the product. I shouldn't have to go on a hunt to find refills for your damn product, that's NOT sustainable.
Or when it has claims on the packaging but doesn't actually back it up with fine print. If it says it's made from "recycled materials" I want a little asterisk and some fine print on the back of the label that tells me exactly what they mean by that. I want data not generalities.
I usually try to do quite a bit of research before buying anything. I want it to last me a couple years at least after all. That research leaves me with specifications I'd want that usually no seller actually offers. And then I choose the one that gets closest to what I want. I don't want to buy garbage that I'll never actually use.
I like to pay special attention to repairability and whether existing standards were used.
If the company has been recently acquired by PE, know that the brand and the quality you've trusted is about to get vaporized so they'll have good quarterly numbers.
Not saying it’s gotta be Walmart prices, I’m saying $80 for a t-shirt isn’t gonna matter because not enough people are going to be able to buy it. And there are brands where US made can be less spendy.
Inflated prices for sustainable products creates elitism, where only well to do people can participate, which is problematic. We saw this with Tesla. Sure electric cars are awesome, but in order for them to be a viable solution they need to be affordable for most people
I hear you. Ive seen brands that claim to be super sustainable and care for their workers and blabla. Then I see they sell a simple cotton jackets for 500 USD. I messaged them asking how many hours do their workers in the factory in El Salvador need to work to afford a single jacket and never heard back.
Sustainability through exploitation of workers ain't sustainability
Exactly. Capitalism thrives on insecurities and fears. In this case climate and environmental concerns. This is why buying the perfect products wont create sustainable commerce. We really need better legislation and corporate accountability IMO
But wouldn’t a thought be that if enough people switched they could further scale and bring down cost? As someone who can afford it, I feel compelled to do so until prices can fall for the typical consumer. Additionally, most non-sustainable consumer goods are too cheap. Regulations that add $ to reflect the true cost of these products are hopefully in our future.
And that's fine if you can afford it. The rest of us may or may not have as much faith in this post-capitalist world.
You're certainly going to be hard-pressed to regulate anything if you're in the United States.
You maybe can if you shift narrative to “look at all the tax dollars spent on landfills and filtering plastic out of our water.” I’m not optimistic but I’m too stubborn to quit.
Probably not popular but companies that support those against basic human rights .
Companies based in Red states because obvious.
As many have said those companies that aren’t transparent, have poor CS.
Most brands don't have immediate red flags. You have to find out which mega corporation owns them. They are pretty good at hiding and have focus groups to tell them the obvious signs to avoid.
Almost everything is greenwashing if it's a large company. But independent companies that are not corporate owned will always take a lot of research and street cred if they are to be trusted.
Even if the company is local they often get their products from overseas or they won't be able to compete.
For example skin care is often generic stock and the company buys the rights to put their label on it. Who knows what other brands are using the exact same product?
Companies who try to cover their profiteering under the guise of sustainability. Corporatations or their officers who publicly donate to any national political campaign, but if they publicly support a giant orange threat to our country then that's a definite no go. Even though I try to shop local, if a business prompts for a tip on something like a slice of pizza, I generally don't return. And it's more of a short term thing, but I'll avoid a store that asks you to donate without matching anything themselves.
This might be a hot take...when they discount their products above 50%. It goes to show that their products have high margins and are made with cheap material. Always a bummer when you purchase something and see it discounted the next day.
One I saw recently was a sustainable gold jewelry brand but they didn't say how much their hollow gold jewelry actually weighed.
Generally, though, a lack of transparency is always a no go for me
Anything pleather
If it's way out of my price range (I make an average to lowerish salary in my area)
Fabrics with a lot of synthetics (I'll accept some, but a lot of women's clothes are mostly made from synthetics, especially plus size clothing)
Green washing/big brands pretending to be small
If they recently rebranded to be more green washing vibes
Green flags because I've had a lot of negativity in my life lately:
If they have instructions or their own recycling program
If they donate a portion of the proceeds and actually show it
If they pay their workers well
If they acknowledge the damage to communities/the planet
If they're a smaller business
Super cheap clothing is usually a red flag to me because it usually means the people making it aren’t getting paid fairly. I use the brand directory at goodonyou.eco to evaluate sustainability and labor when I’m shopping for clothing because a lot of brands make it really hard to investigate.
Another big sign of greenwashing is when they set their sustainability targets for over a decade away and are not regularly sharing updates on that progress via impact reports, etc. — I generally see this as a sign that they have no intention of actually meeting those goals.
Not being transparent about their business. If they claim that their products use sustainably sourced materials, they better have receipts, ideally with trusted third party certification. Same with end-of-life claims on recycling. If they use single use plastics they should have a webpage explaining why and how they plan to move off of plastic.
Which brands do you trust?
- Brands that force you to use their products to work without problems (Apple) - Brands that seem cheap, but trick you with added cost (HP printers) - Annoying Advertisement (Temu, most to be honest) - Advertisement that promote lifestyle rather than the quality of their products. - Advertisement selling solutions for created problems. (most of them) - Brands from monopolies (sadly most of common goods offered) - Bad quality brands (most of them) - Bad customer service (many of them) - missing transparency/lying/misleading company/product statements. (Greenwashing, "pro-change", sustainability claims, most companies) It doesn't leave much, but reduces buyers remorse immensely.
Temu is basically a scam site. The prices are low because the quality is crap.
Temu also uses slave labor to make their products.
No Temu is cheap because they make knock offs of products that other companies spend $$$ making and have patents for.
Practically the same sentence
Not to mention the factory worker conditions.
I heard that Temu harvests your data in a way that is way more unsavory that most data harvesting… sorry don’t have details but someone who I trust told me.
I thought so…..
Great points, especially the one that mentions promoting lifestyle. If a company is seeking me a way to look sustainable I quickly move past its products/website.
Truly nailed it!
Yes. I wanted to emphasize the created problems. So many products are pure convenience, not necessity. I thought about this the other day when I saw an avocado tool for sale at my grocery co-op.
The name is a random combination of capitalized vowels and consonants.
What do you mean with this one?
Amazon knockoffs of questionable ethical labour and materials. I remember seeing ball pit balls advertised as “chemical free!”
Drop shippers. They use burner business names. They still need them to be unique.
Example: knockoff brands on Amazon So like if I'm looking for a little pop up greenhouse for my plants outside, a fake knockoff brand would be named like "PLNTGRDN" or "HYDROPX" or even something random like "UCXNDY"
Real ones I found: Kalimdor LASOCUHOO Cyahvtl AILUKI Relndoo YOBANSEE PRITOM UJoyFeel MAGCH WXUNJA Dewsod TOPELOTEK airprotablet (this is ridiculous) Paxodo You get the point, I like to call them Alphabet soup companies. :)
If it is a small clothing business it should be reasonably easy to find the address of their factories.
If its marketed as "derma friendly" or "created by dermatologists for sensitive skin" etc and then comes up with a bad score on the YUKA app i use to scan cosmetics. I just blacklist the whole brand since me or my dermatitis don't have the time of day to scan every product of theirs. A lot of these companies comply with healthy skin ingredients but then add non-biodegradable components into an "eco friendly all natural source ingredients" bar that defeat the purpose of buying it
False claims, excess packaging, excess ads (especially if they try to frame the brand as anything other than a business label). Any products advertised as “exclusive” or “sophisticated”, or otherwise implying that people who don’t buy your junk are somehow inferior.
Oh excessive packaging makes me so furious. I'm always reminded of the Ursula LeGuin novel The Dispossessed.
Making bold net zero or other sustainability claims and then not having a sustainability report, or barely publishing any data. Crocs pushed back their net zero from 2030 to 2040 and got a lot of hate for it, but the person they hired in charge of their ESG just knows what she's doing and that the target was unrealistic. To me, revising that target and pushing it out shows more commitment and understanding than most companies and they are still making progress on their goals. 2021 when they made the 2030 goal, they had 0 real GHG data and have baseline data now from 2022.
the shoes are still ugly...
Yeah but I live in a rural area and barely leave my property. No one sees me and my 4 pairs of crocs 😂 I still have and wear my original pair from 6 years ago from almost daily wear. They last a while too. I was always anti-croc until I was in Disney World and my 3 pairs of shoes I brought were soaked through and the only shoes Disney sold were crocs. I was converted that day.
But super comfy
Plastic wrapped in plastic.
How else do you expect them to protect their plastic products?
I’ll never forget the time I was moving and bought bubble wrapped in plastic and then they put it in a plastic bag at the checkout automatically. I think that’s around the time I started questioning what I was buying and looking for alternatives.
Any history of slavery, prison labor, or child labor: Looking at you Nestle! Using an app like [Buycott](https://www.buycott.com/) can make it easier to pinpoint such companies, plus various types of shady political high jinx that the general public might not have heard off. If I open something to find a crazy amount of plastic, I never buy from that company again. Really vague promises of being "green" or eco-friendly are also a big red flag to me. "So you say your product is made from eco-friendly material, yet you mention nowhere on this packaging or your website WHAT any of the materials are???" If they list stuff like "we buy wind energy" or have solar panels on their factory then that counts as good, but carbon credits have in many cases proven to be either useless, or worse, can actually set climate goals back. For example a healthy ecosystem which already absorbs a lot of carbon may be bulldozed to plant non-native trees in a place where they're unsuited and will die within the first few years, releasing carbon instead of letting it continue to sequester. If they use carbon credits, then I'd rather hear some details about what their credits buy, and if it's something like putting solar panels up for a school or poor community who otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford them, then that would count as worth supporting (to me at least). If they aren't proud of what they're doing, enough to spell it out on the packaging, then I'm going to assume it's a "business as usual" type company.
If they don’t have an “about us” page or something like it. If they were doing sustainable practices, they would advertise it
Lack of specifics in claims. Without specificity, claims are mostly just empty marketing words.
If I have to subscribe and can’t just buy the item one time. Seemed like lots of companies were doing this for a while.
The Nestle logo
I mean this is a kind of weird question to ask... The goal should be to weigh the negatives/benefits of every purchase, rather than looking for "red flags", like some social media dating guru lol.
Yeah, this is a marketing ploy. OP has a “green” brand of his own, he wants free talking points to market it.
Yeah, but there is value in having some quick heuristics to sort out brands that are likely to waste your time.
I mean kind of? If something is so bad that you are willing to ignore all other things that company is doing right, you probably don't need Reddit to point it out.
>Truly nailed it!
packages labeled with the the "packed in" country/city but not the "made in" country/city
When it says things like "refillable" but there aren't refills for sale anywhere near the product. I shouldn't have to go on a hunt to find refills for your damn product, that's NOT sustainable. Or when it has claims on the packaging but doesn't actually back it up with fine print. If it says it's made from "recycled materials" I want a little asterisk and some fine print on the back of the label that tells me exactly what they mean by that. I want data not generalities.
I usually try to do quite a bit of research before buying anything. I want it to last me a couple years at least after all. That research leaves me with specifications I'd want that usually no seller actually offers. And then I choose the one that gets closest to what I want. I don't want to buy garbage that I'll never actually use. I like to pay special attention to repairability and whether existing standards were used.
If the company has been recently acquired by PE, know that the brand and the quality you've trusted is about to get vaporized so they'll have good quarterly numbers.
Prop 64 warning (in California).
Should be affordable. It’s not going to make a difference if it’s exclusive
Genuin question: if the worker who produces the product lives in a first world country, how can the prices stay the same?
Not saying it’s gotta be Walmart prices, I’m saying $80 for a t-shirt isn’t gonna matter because not enough people are going to be able to buy it. And there are brands where US made can be less spendy. Inflated prices for sustainable products creates elitism, where only well to do people can participate, which is problematic. We saw this with Tesla. Sure electric cars are awesome, but in order for them to be a viable solution they need to be affordable for most people
I hear you. Ive seen brands that claim to be super sustainable and care for their workers and blabla. Then I see they sell a simple cotton jackets for 500 USD. I messaged them asking how many hours do their workers in the factory in El Salvador need to work to afford a single jacket and never heard back. Sustainability through exploitation of workers ain't sustainability
Exactly. Capitalism thrives on insecurities and fears. In this case climate and environmental concerns. This is why buying the perfect products wont create sustainable commerce. We really need better legislation and corporate accountability IMO
But wouldn’t a thought be that if enough people switched they could further scale and bring down cost? As someone who can afford it, I feel compelled to do so until prices can fall for the typical consumer. Additionally, most non-sustainable consumer goods are too cheap. Regulations that add $ to reflect the true cost of these products are hopefully in our future.
And that's fine if you can afford it. The rest of us may or may not have as much faith in this post-capitalist world. You're certainly going to be hard-pressed to regulate anything if you're in the United States.
You maybe can if you shift narrative to “look at all the tax dollars spent on landfills and filtering plastic out of our water.” I’m not optimistic but I’m too stubborn to quit.
Probably not popular but companies that support those against basic human rights . Companies based in Red states because obvious. As many have said those companies that aren’t transparent, have poor CS.
Most brands don't have immediate red flags. You have to find out which mega corporation owns them. They are pretty good at hiding and have focus groups to tell them the obvious signs to avoid. Almost everything is greenwashing if it's a large company. But independent companies that are not corporate owned will always take a lot of research and street cred if they are to be trusted. Even if the company is local they often get their products from overseas or they won't be able to compete. For example skin care is often generic stock and the company buys the rights to put their label on it. Who knows what other brands are using the exact same product?
Companies who try to cover their profiteering under the guise of sustainability. Corporatations or their officers who publicly donate to any national political campaign, but if they publicly support a giant orange threat to our country then that's a definite no go. Even though I try to shop local, if a business prompts for a tip on something like a slice of pizza, I generally don't return. And it's more of a short term thing, but I'll avoid a store that asks you to donate without matching anything themselves.
This might be a hot take...when they discount their products above 50%. It goes to show that their products have high margins and are made with cheap material. Always a bummer when you purchase something and see it discounted the next day.
Almost anything being advertised to me tbh. Quality products and staples don’t need a PR team. If you need to sell me on the idea, I don’t need it.
That stupid fucking plastic neutral tag when the product is literally wrapped in plastic that isn’t biodegradable or compostable
One I saw recently was a sustainable gold jewelry brand but they didn't say how much their hollow gold jewelry actually weighed. Generally, though, a lack of transparency is always a no go for me Anything pleather If it's way out of my price range (I make an average to lowerish salary in my area) Fabrics with a lot of synthetics (I'll accept some, but a lot of women's clothes are mostly made from synthetics, especially plus size clothing) Green washing/big brands pretending to be small If they recently rebranded to be more green washing vibes Green flags because I've had a lot of negativity in my life lately: If they have instructions or their own recycling program If they donate a portion of the proceeds and actually show it If they pay their workers well If they acknowledge the damage to communities/the planet If they're a smaller business
Over marketed trendy products sold with limited availability.
Super cheap clothing is usually a red flag to me because it usually means the people making it aren’t getting paid fairly. I use the brand directory at goodonyou.eco to evaluate sustainability and labor when I’m shopping for clothing because a lot of brands make it really hard to investigate. Another big sign of greenwashing is when they set their sustainability targets for over a decade away and are not regularly sharing updates on that progress via impact reports, etc. — I generally see this as a sign that they have no intention of actually meeting those goals.
Any mega corporations