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Recommended Reading
Many students are becoming more and more interested in ethical studies. Ethics are our values simply “what is right” and “what is wrong”. Recently more and more businesses have realised that it is in their best interests to be ethical. One of the first people to run a completely ethical business was Anita Roddick setting up the Body Shop. This business now has more than 900 natural products and has brought wealth to some of the poorest areas of the world but encouraging them to use their natural surroundings or products to form a business in the form of a co-operative. Anita then bought the products from them. This allowed small villages to become self-sufficient with fresh water supplied, and schools and health centres also being built. A foundation was also set up to look at ethical issues around the world visit the website to find out more http://thebodyshopfoundation.org/
Businesses now realise the impact that not being ethical can have, in the past few years a number of businesses have lost customers once the media has run a story showing them to perhaps employ child labour to make clothes or run sweat shops, even destroying animals or rainforests has an impact on whether or not customers will stay with them.
With the UK being given the Olympics it was very important for us to show that this should be an ethical Olympics. Corporate Social Responsibility had to be at the forefront of this project to make it successful. Wasteland in the East End of London was used and clear plans had to be drawn up to ensure that once the Olympics was over, the site could be used properly for the people of London. The site had to be sustainable. The BBC has run a number of programmes on the Olympics called “Building A Dream” which shows the amount of work put into clearing the site and ensuring its sustainability for the future. Its incredibly interesting to watch as you find out about the poisons in the soil and how they had to clean the soil before building. Although buildings were knocked down, the materials from the building had to be salvaged, cleaned and used again in the construction. You can find out how difficult this was but also how much money it saved. For the first time, local people and groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were consulted for ideas and to ensure that as a country we led the way in building a Green Olympics. The BBC also has part of their site dedicated to the 2012 Olympics at http://www.bbc.co.uk/2012/
You can visit the website and use the webcam to see what is going on http://www.london2012.com/ or take a trip around the Olympics to view the buildings and find out how the idea and plans were formed. If you are writing a project on ethics this is a fascinating one to consider, with so much information available to you.
Ethics is addictive, once you read and learn about one thing that is wrong, you will want to go on and find out more and what is being done to improve situations! Ethics covers so many topics from Corporate Social Responsiblity, insider trading, copyright and intellectual property, ethical business such as Body Shop, Co-Operative Bank to unethical topics like child labour, or debating wether planned obsolescence is right or wrong! You decide!
