Your Shopping Superpower: Follow Your Values and Better Your World One Purchase at a Time - Paperback

by Diane Osgood (Author)

Your Shopping Superpower provides an insightful guide and strategies for shoppers to align the contents in their carts with their personal values.

Are there harmful toxins in your food and body care? Who makes the products you purchase and under what conditions? What impact does the production of these items have on the environment? If 70% of the U.S. economy is driven by consumer spending, then every purchase we make has a physical and social impact on the world. Unfortunately, our shopping choices can unintentionally contribute to climate change and social injustice. Many people wish they could do more to combat these unjust and unsustainable outcomes. So what is the connection between our purchases and this impact? Your Shopping Superpower explores this important question and offers a comprehensive guide that navigates toward positive and sustainable shopping practices by providing pragmatic tips, tools and revealing how our habits can help reduce climate change, support companies with equitable workplace conditions, and foster diverse, local businesses.

Broken into categories including People, Planet, Community, and Health, Diane Osgood expands on key issues regarding climate degradation, labor exploitation, products containing carcinogens and toxins, and the importance of supporting local, women-owned, and minority-owned businesses while covering an array of products that include food, fashion, gifts, household items, and personal care. Addressing shoppers' doubts about whether consumer choices truly have an impact and their concerns about costs and accessibility, Osgood shows how making these easy changes fosters happiness. With helpful diagrams and firsthand stories on climate and social injustice, Your Shopping Superpower informs and guides shoppers on how to:

Implement one change per week Identify trustworthy certifications, rating systems, and apps Detect greenwashing and other misleading marketing Determine which purchases to switch for maximum impact Handle and approach choices that aren't easy or affordable

By changing what we buy, we can initiate the change in our economy's environmental footprint and social impact. To enact change, we must start simple; it's about progress, not perfection.

Author Biography

Diane Osgood, PhD, discovered her shopping superpower while studying wild orangutans in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Watching the tropical forest cut down before her eyes, she realized that if people stopped buying products made from tropical wood, the deforestation would stop. This realization led her to earn a Ph.D. in Environmental Economics at the London School of Economics and become an authority on sustainable and ethical products.

Sustainability isn't just her work. It's her passion. She's a nerd with a knack for translating complex issues into plain words.

For more than 30 years, she has helped Fortune Global 500 companies create products that are better for the planet and all people, integrate sustainability into everything they do, and develop strategies to bring sustainability stretch goals to life. DuPont, Meta, Takeda Pharmaceuticals and Richard Branson's Virgin businesses are among her clients.

She is a co-author with Seth Godin and others on the best-selling The Carbon Almanac (Penguin, 2022) and writes occasionally for online journals.