[weberc2]

Thanks for pointing me to fair trade; I'll have a look. There are a lot of things I'm interested in, but mostly they fall into one of a few groups. For any given product, I want to know:

1. If (or to what degree) the product was made via exploitative labor conditions

2. How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)

3. Does the product benefit from subsidies? (e.g., is a foreign product cheaper only because shipping is heavily subsidized relative to a local alternative)

4. Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised. If the product is fraudulent, can I trust that the company (including investors and leadership) will be held to account or will they simply rebrand and continue their scheme? This concern spans the gamut from Walmart selling name-brand merchandise from low-quality OEMs to companies paying for fraudulent Amazon reviews.

There are probably other concerns as well. In my experience, these concerns seem to be highly bimodal. On average, products which are not Chinese (i.e., not sold/manufactured/etc by Chinese companies) score very highly while Chinese products score very poorly. So while it would be great to have some certification provided for each of those concerns, I would settle for some certification with respect to whether the product is Chinese or not (of course, if that certification took off, there would be all sorts of issues with enforcing it--Chinese companies could operate shell companies and so on).

[blotter_paper]

Labor conditions and pay are theoretically covered under fair trade.

> How harmful is the product to the environment (manufacturing through disposal)

This one is more in line with Cradle 2 Cradle: https://www.c2ccertified.org/

> Is the product I'm buying reasonably advertised.

I'm unfamiliar with this organization, but a search popped up the Trustworthy Accountability Group: https://www.tagtoday.net/certified-against-fraud-program/

I didn't find anything on my first page of results for certificates of non-subsidisation.

[weberc2]

Wow, thanks very much. I spent a good chunk of Saturday morning googling around for something like that last one. I’ll look into all of these.

EDIT: TAG seems to focus on eliminating fraudulent Internet advertising; it's a much narrower scope than I had in mind.