Ask HN: What are ethical companies like Patagonia and some digital counterparts?
Hey HN! I'm on the lookout for companies that stand out in ethical and sustainable practices, much like Patagonia in the retail world. I'm also interested in finding digital and tech companies with a strong commitment to these values.
Have you come across any firms in the tech space making noteworthy efforts in sustainability or ethics, perhaps similar to the way Basecamp/Hey has shifted their infrastructure for better environmental impact? (recent switch from Cloud to Rack server)
I'm also keen to support physical product companies that are dedicated to ethical manufacturing. Any suggestions or experiences with brands that prioritize this approach would be incredibly helpful.
Thanks in advance for sharing your insights and recommendations possibly first-hand experience.
59 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 63.5 ms ] threadThere isn't really anything about the certification process that's binding, and it's definitely gamed. There are multiple MLMs that are certified B-corps. I would liken it to those semi-paid 40 under 40 lists that pop up every year.
It's become a federation of cooperatives so some members are better or worse but generally being owned by the people in the communities it operates in tends to lead to more ethical behavior.
Ethical companies are companies that offer products cheaply so that everyone can afford them, like Ryanair, Xiaomi, Google, Meta ...
The second half reads like unhinged libertarian propaganda.
- They have free repairs for their clothing, both in-store (for simpler repairs) or they'll ship it to their Reno facility for more extensive repairs
- For clothes people no longer want, they have a trade-in program where they'll resell your clothes on their Worn Wear website (https://wornwear.patagonia.com/) , or in some locations, they have a rack of used clothes right inside their storefront. I've gotten many of my clothes used this way, which is amazing in outdoorsy towns without a dedicated outdoor thrift store.
- They have recycling bins for clothes in all their shops for the things that can't be resold. These get sent back to corporate and some portion of it ends up as post-consumer fill in sleeping bags, etc. (I'm not sure what they do with the fibers that are too degraded).
- They sponsor various environmental orgs: https://www.patagonia.com/actionworks/about/. A few people I know have been recipients of these grants
- They provide discounted/free products to environmental groups. In the past I've worked for a few orgs that were part of this program, and I'm personally super grateful for that (outdoor gear is expensive, and as a student or nonprofit worker, their donations helped a ton)
- The founder recently changed the company into a nonprofit trust fund, whose profits are donated to climate efforts. The family gets a small share of the company (2%), but the remaining 98% gets donated to the trust. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62906853
- They do annual reporting on their materials and labor sourcing: https://www.patagonia.com/our-footprint/ This doesn't mean they've fixed all the issues, just that they at least try to report on them and identify areas for gradual improvement (which they have been doing, incorporating more and more recycled fibers, better down sourcing, etc. over the years that I've seen). For example, their use of recycled plastics, hemp, and organic cotton have gone from 43% in 2016 to 91% in 2023 (by weight): https://www.patagonia.com/our-responsibility-programs.html. In particular, 95% of their polyester fabrics are now recycled: https://www.patagonia.com/our-footprint/recycled-polyester.h...
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I don't know any other clothing company that does as much, do you? Of course you should go to thrift stores whenever you can, but sometimes you need specialized gear that thrift stores don't always carry. A lot of men, especially, hold on to our gear for a long time (most of these companies have lifetime guarantees) and not many make it into thrift stores in good condition to begin with. Somebody still has to make new clothes, and at least they're trying (and also sell their own used clothes).
Insomuch as new clothes have to be made at all, isn't it better that the company behind them at least tries...?
It’s like praising the serial killer who’s killed the fewest people of all the serial killers. It’s better to just not be a serial killer.
What do you mean? Clothes don't last forever. Doesn't someone have to make new ones...?
I can't tell if you're advocating for global nudism, or if you believe we can just reuse the existing clothes supply forever? Granted, probably they'll last a few decades at least.
It sounds pretty extreme. I do wish there was a way to make nonplastic outdoor wear though. What did people do in the old days? It's not like hiking in the rain/snow was invented recently...
Believing otherwise is like somebody thinking they should have kids to ensure there’s no population collapse. Plenty of people are having plenty of kids! They can sit out and it’ll be fine.
> I do wish there was a way to make nonplastic outdoor wear though. What did people do in the old days? It's not like hiking in the rain/snow was invented recently...
You’re taking a romantic view of something decidedly unromantic. It wasn’t fun! Sure wool has some great properties but wear a Barbour waxed canvas jacket as rain gear on a multi day hike before pining for the days of yore.
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/technology
https://guide.ethical.org.au/guide/browse/guide/?cat=600&sub...
I’m guessing it’s a much more significant hit to the bottom line to take a hard stance on environmental stuff vs DEI/social justice etc, which kind of surprised me but I can’t think of another explanation. It’s not like they were afraid of alienating market segments due to political alignment, since their (good imho!) stance on antiracisim was definitely just as politically charged as taking a strong stance on sustainability would have been…
Normally these brands are the other way around (all about the environmental, less concerned about social justice).
[1] https://www.zenbusiness.com/pbc/
Patagonia is pretty legit (especially once they became a nonprofit, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-62906853) (edit: on the environmental side, I mean. Labor-wise, they're still not great. See sibling comments discussing this), but I'd say they're the exception more than the norm.
B-corps are a good starting point (see mtmail's comment), but even then they should still be individually evaluated.
On the labor side, tech co-ops are a (small) movement: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
In general tech companies are too capitalist/VC-driven to be truly concerned about labor matters. And devs are so highly paid compared to most fields of work that there's not a strong drive towards collective organizing and unionization, but that's slowly changing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unionization_in_the_tech_secto... (Kickstarter, Activision, Alphabet, etc.)
For physical products, there are certifications like USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified, FSC (for wood/paper products), but none of those are as powerful as their proponents would like them to be. They're still generally better than nothing, but depending on what you're trying to optimize for, you can find flaws in each of them.
In general I would say well-intentioned efforts at ethical sourcing and manufacturing cannot overcome the drastic differences in labor and costs of living between countries; for you to be able to buy a can of coffee at $10 with organic, fair trade, shade grown etc. certifications, that means something has to give. That usually means some farmer is growing and harvesting them for pennies a day. Fair trade pays more than non-fair trade, but it's still not much. Direct Trade is an attempt to improve that further (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_trade), but AFAIK there's not a third-party certification for it, so you're pretty much taking companies at their word. There is rarely transparency about just how much different parts of the supply chain are getting paid, and how each part of the chain handles their environmental practices. It's a tragedy of globalized capitalism -- and arguably its backbone, cheaper sourcing == higher profits -- so inherently at odds. I suppose you can get entirely US-grown-and-roasted coffee (Hawaii?) but there's not much transparency in the labor chain there either, i.e. are they just importing ag labor below a livable wage.
There are small tech orgs actually dedicated to on-the-ground local sustainability, like https://www.appropedia.org or https://www.opensourceecology.org/. These are pretty legit b...
I might go a step further and argue that, as a whole, "green capitalism" is primarily successful at guilt reduction, not sustainability. The math behind most of these efforts, climatically or socially, just doesn't work out. Consumers demand cheap shit, which almost always means automation + exploitation. The overwhelming majority of these efforts don't really amount to meaningful changes: they've been around for decades and the climate isn't getting any better, the wealth gaps (between and within countries) are usually getting worse, etc.
You might be able to subsidize some local efforts here and there, like a small hand-farmed CSA who pay all their willing employees a living wage and sells produce at a drastic markup. That might have better labor practices (though farming is no easy task; it's back-breaking work), but there's no guarantee of that either. Even then there's often exploitation (of idealistic WOOFers, for example). And there is often a lot of CO2 from food spoilage of fresh foods, which can sometimes be worse than refrigeration of frozen foods. There's just no guarantee of anything, really, unless you do a really deep dive into whatever effort you're interested in.
Counterproductively, I think many of these efforts and labels actually hurt the movements by providing consumers too easy of a way out. "Oh, I'll just buy organic/fair trade/whatever" and then they stop thinking about the problem altogether, believing that they've done their part and that the problem is solved, when in reality almost nothing has changed, systematically. It reduces our cognitive dissonance around market-driven capitalism vs sustainability and labor practices, but improves almost nothing in the real world.
It's all a bit depressing, and I don't think we'll find anything actually-sustainable under current models of capitalism. The whole point of our system is to concentrate profits in the hands of a few at the expense of the many -- whether the "many" is people, animals, places, whatever.
Want actual sustainability? We need much, much bigger socioeconomic changes.
But I’m not sure if this fits what you are asking for exactly.
We build a navigation app that (1) helps drive down CO2 emissions and (2) encourages good urbanism, by helping people in urban areas make optimal use of their public transit and bikeshare systems.
In dense urban areas like NYC and Paris, where most of our users live, proposing a “most environmentally-friendly car trip”, like most consumer navigation apps do, is entirely beside the point. Carbon neutral transport options are just as fast or marginally slower than cars in these locales, especially when combining bikeshare and transit trips to eliminate long walks, and timing those trips with real-time transit data to eliminate waits at the stop. We believe in the compounding effects of good public transit and work with a few hundred transit agencies to make their service more accessible and accountable to riders.
Besides having a worthwhile mission, we also know that it’s only defensible in the long term with a sustainable business model, which we’ve managed by partnering with major transit agencies (like LA Metro, Muni, the MNTA, STM, OC Transpo, etc.) and having a soft paywall to encourage user subscriptions, which nullifies any incentive to monetize via impertinent ads and all those other unsavoury business practices regularly pursued by other companies in the consumer nav space.
Relatedly, we’re always on the lookout for bright, ethical, city-loving engineers — especially ones whose passions are machine learning, data compression, mapping, and mobile development. If that’s you: https://jobs.transitapp.com
> Relatedly, we’re always on the lookout for bright, ethical, city-loving engineers — especially ones whose passions are machine learning, data compression, mapping, and mobile development.
There's only one listing there (for an Android engineer in Montreal). Are there other potential openings?
Most of the ethical-themed alternatives to a mass-market product don't seem to succeed at displacing the mass-market, but there are ethical alternatives in most every category for the cohort of people that will pay a premium for it. Note -- premium is not just higher price; spending more time, dealing with a less polished user experience, are also costs associated with prioritizing ethical alternatives.
Agreed, this is the big prize, and Patagonia seems unique in this regard. They might not make all their clothes in well-paid artisanal shops in Tennessee, but they have carved out a good chunk of their market.
To break into the mass market and advance ethical production seems to require just as much business acumen as commitment to ethics.
That’s the biggest thing I’m watching for in Framework. Can they do what is needed to bring their ideals to the mass market in volume, or will it just hang on as a bit player?
There are many ways to argue the Basecamp decision. Framework themselves had a nice recent email to customers titled "We are not sustainable" that summarizes the conundrum.
It's worth reading MacAskill "Doing Good Better" and following the Ethical Altruism thread and the 80,000 hours stuff but with the awareness that the FTX fraud grew in that primordial soup. B-Corps are similarly non-useful as a signal of actual organization behavior. Some useful metrics are produced from corporate governance ESG/CER work but those have also to be read without the rose tinted glasses.
There is in some US states a binding corporate structure called something like Public Benefit Corp. They are as often as not used as the shell for a quasi government entity (and whether those are ultimately bound to ethical and sustainable practices is a question probably answered best with another question- "on what timeframe.")
It's easy to rattle off a list of people who genuinely tried to be ethical but went astray, or fraudsters who disguised themselves in the clothing of morality and philanthropy.
But none of these anecdotes of failure is evidence that doing business ethically and sustainably is a "dead end".
OP's example of Patagonia is evidence that it's possible.
Apart from the ‘Submerge’ meaning, Submer is also the acronym of our company values, the first being ‘Sustainable’. We are also backed by impact investors like Norrsken VC and PlanetFirst.
If interested in learning more you can check our website (https://submer.com) and some of our job openings here: https://careers.submer.com/
Stop trying to make secular indulgences a thing. You can’t buy pay your way into being an ethical person. Why not spend your time instead of your money?
Some companies are more ethical than others.
You’re right about not buying things you don’t need, but when you do need something, do you buy it from someone who stole it from someone’s grandma or somewhere else?
ESG scores like anything similar are intended to take some of cognitive load off. People don’t want to or have time to thoroughly evaluate every company they might do business with. I think it’s better than nothing.
"Ethical" is an ambiguous word - so I've focused on the idea of "Dependability", which I've broken down focus on "Sustainability", "Transparency", and "Craftsmanship" that I outline on the homepage.
I built a couple VC-backed companies and didn't like that the products only lasted a couple of years, so this company structure allows me to focus on building products that I won't shut down, and it lets me leave money on the table with pricing.
Technically this is a "Personal holding company" (PHC) - I'm a one-person business with no investors. I think you'll see more companies like this in the future. And, I think that the PHC model allows businesses to focus more on customers than investors, because they don't need to transition to a "value extraction" phase in the future.
I think your product pages (Booklet, Postcard) are great. Booklet in particular is intriguing... it reminds me of Discourse (the forum). Might be helpful to have a comparison page?
> Is it enough to live off of?
I do a little bit of consulting [1] , which bridges the gap. That way, I'm not losing money building the company. Though, all of my products make revenue, and things are doing well in relative growth (+60% MoM last month) even if the absolute numbers aren't big. I did some consulting to bootstrap Moonlight [2] to profitability, and it worked. I find the consulting is motivating, because I get to work directly with founders on high-growth businesses. It maintains a sense of urgency, and makes sure I am building a business instead of an art project.
I strongly believe that fractional work is the future, which is why one of the Contraption Co. projects is a community for fractional workers called FRCTNL [3]. Affiliate links on it have surprised me as a non-trivial revenue source.
[1] https://www.contraption.co/consulting
[2] https://moonlightwork.com
[3] https://frctnl.xyz
It has some major limitations and is certain to be incomplete/inaccurate in many ways (I think it is basically the result of one person's PhD work and a continuation of that effort afterwards), but, it's still a great starting point to at least understand the broad strokes of which companies have the best/worst track records, and I think something similar scaled up and with a more transparent code/database could do a lot of good in helping to keep track of how organizations are behaving over longer the long run.
https://humanitix.com/au/reports/nov2023
Companies like Patagonia and Thankyou (https://thankyou.co) have been role models for us, but it’s been pretty lonely in the tech sector!
… AMA?