Ethical credentials for free, scraped-together from the country where a product is made

Exampes

• made-in-albania
• made-in-uk
• made-in-france
• made-in-italy
• made-in-poland
• made-in-spain
• made-in-portugal
• made-in-china-pr

The pages are set-up already by my shopping cart software which expects them to be used for brands or manufacturers, but I don't have much for sale with a known brand name on it, so the pages were going spare.  Under each list of scores I write

• "more than a vegan shoe brand, but these costs reduce what's left for brand advertising, PR & packaging for smart retail, rapid style changes and air freight, new moulds, or fiddly sewing. You can draw your own brand, like a smiley face or a black spot or something if you want."

This is a great relief to someone who is used to getting ethical credentials for free just by writing "vegan" on a product on a home made web site, next to "wash at 40 degrees" or "postage three pounds". Other producers have always had a tougher job trying to justify one factory in Bangladesh as being a better employer than another factory in Sri Lanka. If we know where a product was made we can compare free information about each country, just so long as someone has done the work already and put some kind of number on it. Not that there is a number for human rights in China because that country is off the bottom of the scale, but most countries have a number.

For a long time, I didn't know that a human rights index existed and I think it's quite new. Mary Creagh mentioned it on a video of the Environmental Audit Committee that I sat-through, and I immediately stole the idea. Another came soon after on a Make it British virtual trade show where Mr Nieper of David Nieper Ltd gave a video speech about his company's carbon emissions, as reported by Nottingham University who realised that electriciy units take more CO2 to make in China than in the UK. The UK v China CO2 emmission report is buried on the David Niaper Ltd web site, but after some googling I found the International Energy Agency. It shows each country scored on a few boxes. The ratio of electriciy output to CO2 produced making electricity is a simple number, in some unit or other.

SSA.gov in the USA was a previous google discovery. It publishes a concise guide to the social security system, if any, in each country and adds a list of government spending on headings like health and education. The guide seems to come from the International Social Security Association, who have a permanant link for each country but a much slower web site and a series of drop-downs for each one that makes it impossible to glance at; you have to know what you're looking for before you can find it. So I have stuck to SSA.gov and their information pages called a "world factbook", published by the CIA.