A view of customer pressure for better service.

The protesters outside St Paul’s have been making a lot of headlines recently and creating a discussion point around the nature of capitalism and how the economy works.These are far too big and important issues to go into in my humble blog post, however I did want to raise the interesting point of how we the consumer can drive big business to do more in terms of reducing the impact on our environment.

I was interested to see that www.epeat.net has been set up with the view of identifying manufacturers that have products with more environmentally-friendly features. This is an outcome of consumers wanting to know who is doing more to protect the environment and therefore create the real link between companies that care about their consumers.

I very much believe that the consumers of today and tomorrow will get better, more environmentally friendly, electronics simply because they choose to buy from the companies seen to be doing more. There are already some very good examples out there – for example, Samsung producing LED’s with no mercury and 50% less power consumption.

This to me is how capitalism, and therefore the consumer, can be a positive force. If we avoid bad companies and move towards the harder working companies through natural selection the best companies will survive and thrive.

Now here is a small video to illustrate my point and some new technology.