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It's the ultimate ethical consumer appeal: you buy ethical stuff from an online green or ethical store through a website that either offsets carbon or donates to charity for you.
www.smartlygreen.com offers online shoppers the chance to offset their carbon consumption as well as cash back. Half of the funds raised through net commissions paid to Smartlygreen by the different retailers, from Asda to Adili, are credited to the customers' Smartlygreen loyalty scheme account. To begin with, 80 per cent of the money in the account is donated to the environmental charity Pure, while the remaining 20 per cent turns into cash for you to spend or donate to Pure, if you so wish. Once you've offset your chosen amount of carbon, the balance changes and the charity gets 20 per cent and you get 80 per cent cash back.
Smartlygreen explains: "As a guideline, shoppers can expect on average to offset half a tonne of carbon for every £500 spent via Smartlygreen. This could vary slightly depending on their choice of shops and products, as net commissions are different in some instances. The price of carbon offsets also fluctuates.
We asked Smartlygreen to give us an example using the £92 Trevarno Organics skin care hamper from Adili. They said: "If you purchased the Trevarno Hamper today (before meeting your annual offset target, which may be between 2-8 tonnes), Smartlygreen would donate £3.68 to Pure, and put £0.92 in your cash-back pot. If you purchase the hamper after you have met your annual offset target, these numbers would be reversed.
If offsetting isn't your bag and you'd rather give to a charity of your choice, there's www.giveortake.com. The idea is similar to that of Smartlygreen. On average, you get 10 per cent cash back on everything you buy from a variety of retailers, including Natural Collection, Adili and Ethical Superstore, which you can then decide to give to charities such as Shelter or Trees for Cities.
Giveortake gives its customers 100 per cent of the funds paid by contributing retailers, and if you are not in a do-gooder mood you can also just keep the money for yourself rather than give it to charity -- but then, of course, you can't really boast about being ethical and you also have to pay a £5 service charge for your first £25 of cash-back you earn every year.
But if you decide to, say, give it all to Trees for Cities and buy the Trevarno Organics skin care hamper at £92 from Adili through Giveortake, Trees for Cities will get £9.20, at no extra cost to either you or the charity.
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