I'm not sure I can afford to be an environmentalist

Classes end for us today, so I'm relieved I'll have a little time to do some gift shopping.  I was browsing around over at treehugger.com and here are some of the gifts you can get for under $100.

• A sustainably harvested maple animal puzzle:  $98
• A natural wool yarn knot octopus--with vegetable based dyes: $92
• A birch rocking horse with hand-painted face: $52
• Bauhaus building blocks: $150

Now here's what I can get at Toys'R'Us:

• 16-piece solid wood farm cube puzzle: $7.99
• 18-inch hot purple bean bag octopus: $14.49
• Clippety Clop 'classic wooden' Rocking Horse: $39.99
• Brio wooden colored building blocks: $19.99

Who says markets can't put a price on the environment?

Comments

[Wacky Hermit]

Hey, I resemble that comment! I make and sell organic cotton dishcloths and scrubbers. However, unlike what you found on treehugger.com, most of my items are priced under $5.00, which is quite reasonable for something handmade.

Full disclosure: treehugger.com rejected my ad because I didn't have professional photography on my site. That says a little something about the price range you're likely to find through treehugger.com. If I had to invest in professional photography, I wouldn't be able to afford to sell my stuff so low-priced.

If I didn't price them so low, I wouldn't sell anything, because I'd be undercut by all the grannies selling their handmade non-organic stuff at cost. And I make the organic stuff mostly because it sells better. I also make stuff from non-organic cotton, but it doesn't sell as well because everybody thinks they can get their granny to make them dishcloths out of non-organic cotton. The only non-organic dishcloth that sells like crazy is the rainbow dishcloth, which evidently nobody's granny can figure out how to make even though they're exactly the same pattern as the other dishcloths.

[Chris Meisenzahl]

Nice! I need to get to work on a sustainable, eco-friendly, green, low-impact, fair-trade, Kyoto-promoting, hemp-supporting, set of lincoln logs. ;-)

Chris
http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

[Chris Ball]

I wonder though: how much of the price difference between "standard" goods and their sustainable equivalents is due to the sustainability factor, and how much is due simply to economies of scale? It would be interesting to figure this out for a few classes of products.

[John Whitehead]

A friend, I'll call him "Pete," makes a good point. Buy from Toy's 'R Us and donate the difference to the Nature Conservancy.

[Kevin]

Wacky, send me some of your products. I'll photograph them for your site for free (or just in retrun for the product itself) then you can get on Treehugger. Anyway, it's really anoying to hear that Treehugger rejected you for that. I'll have to start boycotting them. (not that I ever bought anything there anyway, but I read it often)

John, before I take your friends advice, I would want to do a study first to see how much good the money donated to Nature Conservancy does *above* the damage done by everything connected with Toys R Us. But I'm not smart enough to do such a study.

Tim, given your environmental economics background, I would be interested to also hear your oppinion of the hidden costs in the Toys R Us items as well as the Tree Hugger items. I would never buy the Tree Hugger things because they seem way too expensive, but I would also not buy the Toys R Us crap either because they seem too cheap to compensate for the side effetcs..