Some websites or magazines look at ethical products, but Ethical Consumer is the only organisation which provides fully transparent rankings of the companies behind the brands and products.
Some products might be considered 'ethical', but the company that owns the brand might not be.
Isn't it better to buy a cruelty-free product from a company that doesn't test its other products on animals, or recycled toilet paper from a firm that isn't cutting down virgin forests for its other ranges?
Using the tables in the magazine, looking deeper into the Shopping Guides on this website or visiting our company profile pages, subscribers can see which companies own each brand, and their ethical record across all the different categories.
See our profile of Amazon as an example of our fully transparent ratings >
How we score the companies
We score each company out of 14 and each product out of 20.
A company starts with a score of 14 and gets marks taken away if it gets criticised in one or more of our categories.
Companies might score negative marks across four main categories, environment, animals, people and politics (see below for a full list of categories and sub-categories).
Companies can score a positive mark under one additional category, company ethos, if they commit to certain things (e.g. Fairtrade) across their whole company group.
Products (on score tables) can receive extra marks for a number of things e.g. being certified organic. Products can therefore score higher marks than companies.
See our bookshops as an example of our shopping guide score tables >
Information Sources
Some of our information comes from previously published sources. These sources include publications and reports by campaign groups like Oxfam, Friends of the Earth and War on Want.
We look at the daily newspapers, public records on pollution and health & safety prosecutions and use directories on the defence and nuclear industries.
We also request information directly from the companies on their environmental policies and reporting, and other policies, such as their attitude towards animal testing and to workers in their supply factories.
Each story we add to the database affects the score of a company for five years. After this period it remains on the database but no longer impacts the company score.
The ratings categories
Our ratings cover around 300 topics in 19 areas in 5 main categories:
