Jo Hand is concerned about climate change and thinks we should make sustainable shopping choices. But in practice, that tends to be difficult. Hand’s company, Giki, is helping consumers in the United Kingdom shop in more eco-friendly ways. Fortunately, Jo Hand and her husband, James, love data. They are driven to help people make sense of the terabytes of data related to climate change and sustainability. They launched Giki Social Enterprise to guide people toward sustainable choices when shopping. Giki is an app that allows users to search for products and quickly learn if they meet certain characteristics, represented by badges. Some of the most popular badges are for carbon footprint, sustainable palm oil, and sustainable packaging, issues that are prominent in the media. The hero badge shows the highest performing products around sustainability and health issues. Hand said people like the hero badge because it is a clear indicator that a product is one of the most sustainable and healthy products on the market. The hero badge helps people feel confident about their purchases. Giki can also mitigate eco-anxiety by giving the public tangible ways to support sustainability. Clear information can make people feel less helpless despite the system that can make sustainable living hard, like the abundance of plastic used for products. What makes Giki so great is the feeling of wholeness to its current app. There are many badges that give people confidence when making sustainable choices. Hand’s commitment to using accurate data also builds integrity into the company.
Check out more at https://heartofwaraba.com/en/stories-of-pride-blog/ and Giki’s website https://giki.earth/
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Author: Jessica Reid
Jessica Reid is an environmental studies, public policy, and media and journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill in the United States. Her passion is understanding how to strategically communicate about the environment to inspire the necessary changes to create a more sustainable future. From Apex, North Carolina, she loves to write and spend time outdoors.
