Since we’ve owned our own home we’ve tried to always use environmentally friendly products for all cleaning and laundry tasks. This has been surprisingly difficult because the big four supermarkets in the UK have had a pretty poor record of having more than one “eco” product in any section at any time.

To understand why this is a problem imagine a simple scenario where a customer’s preferred brand of tinned spaghetti is out of stock, it’s no big deal, there are similar products, so the customer can buy a competing brand and may broaden their culinary tastes. In contrast, if the one available eco-brand of detergent sells out, then the shopper must either compromise their morals and use a product that is damaging to the environment, or, have a contingency plan.

The eco-shopper’s contingency plan often works as follows:

1. If you see product X on the shelf, buy two or three times as much of it as you need so you never run out, or,
2. Go to another supermarket (typically using a polluting vehicle) in the hope that they’ll have the product

The second option is not favourable, so the eco-shopper buys in bulk. The problem with this is that it exacerbates the likelihood of the product being out of stock for other eco-shoppers, some of whom then buy other brands because they don’t have the time to be moral guardians (because they just need to clean the house before Aunt Mabel comes to stay).

So the eco-shopper has to balance their own desire to not use “bad products” without causing the supermarket to sell out and thus force others into using them anyway, and thus increasing the apparent demand for non-eco-friendly products. Hopefully this is a problem that will slowly disappear as more environmentally friendly products are released to compete with the established (and legally compliant but less responsible) brand names.

Fingers crossed eh?