Your Shopping Superpower - by Diane Osgood (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"These days, the ease of online shopping too often numbs us to a hard truth: buying stuff is an act with moral consequences. For decades, Diane Osgood has been an intrepid activist and a truth-teller at the highest levels of the corporate world. Here she presents a compelling case that we not only have an obligation to buy responsibly, but a straight-forward, engaging and rewarding way to do it. This should be required reading for anyone who both shops and is a conscientious citizen of the world."

--E. Benjamin Skinner, author of A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery, and founder of Transparentem

"This book doesn't preach. She understands that perfection is the enemy of progress. She persuaded me to start shopping more sustainably step by step to increase my economic impact. It made me happier. Sustainable shopping is not just about the environment. It's also about helping humanity. I usually donate or recycle most of my books as soon as I finish reading them. This is one book I plan on keeping."

--Biruté Mary Galdikas, PhD, renowned primatologist, conservationist, and author

"This time of urgent challenges encourages us to have a positive impact on nature and society every day. As Diane demonstrates so clearly, shopping is a superpower. It allows each of us to 'vote' daily with our purse and to influence companies and societies with every purchase. Let's not waste that opportunity!"

--Walter Link, Executive Chair of NOW Partners Foundation and Future Economy Forum

"This is a must-read for anyone wanting to leverage their purchase power to build a better world. Diane created the required field manual for responsible purchasing, converting passion into practice. She made it simple for us."

--Justin Dillon, founder, FRDM and Slavery Footprint

"Whether for your health, or for people and planet, this timely guidebook shows you how to unleash your power to vote for the world you want each time you shop. I have been lucky to have had Diane as my mentor for decades and her experience in ethical shopping is unsurpassed. In her own words, 'Now in a world that seems to have lost heart, you can shop with yours.'"

--Julia Ormond, actor and human rights activist

"We all have the power to change the world through the products we buy. Here's a guidebook that shows you how."

--Paul Rice, author of Every Purchase Matters

"Every time we buy, we vote. This timely guidebook empowers us as shoppers to demand good jobs of dignity, clean non-toxic products, and a restored environment"

--Ayesha Barenblat, founder, Remake (www.remake.world)

"A timely masterpiece! A powerful, fact-based work backed by thirty years of experience. Essential reading for our times--insightful, practical, and much needed."

--Diana Verde Nieto, business leader and sustainability expert, author of Reimagining Luxury, and co-founder of Edify Collective

"Balance your buying with your beliefs. In this wise book, learn steps to minimize toxicity and harm to our Earth by harmonizing your values and your choices."

--Elena Brower, author of Practice You and Hold Nothing

"It's difficult to shop our way out of the climate crisis, but we can organize, connect, and make a difference. In this practical guide, Diane Osgood helps us see that we are not alone, and that collective action is not just possible, it's essential."

--Seth Godin, founding editor, The Carbon Almanac

About the Author

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.