3 progressive-friendly apps for your smartphone

These days there are phone apps for everyone. Apps for travelers, apps for foodies and apps for exercise enthusiasts. There’s an app called Carrr Matey that guides you back to your parking spot in a pirate voice.

There are also apps that help progressive people support the issues they care about. Here are three of our favorites.

Buycott: Buy this, not that
    
Organic produce, a hybrid car, nontoxic cleaning solutions. Sometimes it’s easy choose the more sustainable product when you’re shopping. But in many cases it’s not. Buycott makes it easy to shop progressively. Just use your smartphone camera to scan a product’s barcode, then wait a few seconds while Buycott gathers information on the maker, so you can decide to give the company your money or not. Buycott often suggests alternatives. And the app offers quick ways to join campaigns for causes you believe in, like demanding labels on GMO foods and saving honeybees from pesticides.

EWG’s Food Scores: Eat healthier
    
You want to eat healthy but these days that can be difficult. Many foods contain unhealthy ingredients—pesticides, additives, antibiotics—that you’d rather not put in your body but they’re not always listed on the label.

EWG’s Food Scores is an easy-to-navigate database that helps you make healthier, greener food choices. It contains ratings of more than 80,000 products, based on nutrition, processing and potential for presence of pesticides, hormones and antibiotics. It compares the products you search to similar products so you can make the healthier choice.

For example, Food Scores can alert you to the many distasteful ingredients lurking behind a label that says “natural.” Did you know the FDA has never formally defined what a “natural” food is? Generally it means fewer artificial or synthetic ingredients but that’s not always true—and there is virtually no FDA regulation of the “natural” label.

iRecycle: Find where to take it
    
Despite billions of dollars spent on the cause and nearly constant encouragement, Americans today recycle no more than we did 15 years ago. Currently fewer than 35% of U.S. households recycle. Lifting that level to 75% would provide the environmental benefit of removing 50 million cars from the road each year and would generate 1.5 million new jobs.

iRecycle is an easy way to recycle more. It’s the leading app for finding local convenient recycling opportunities in the U.S., providing access to more than 1.6 million ways to recycle over 350 different materials. With iRecycle, you can find places to recycle your old phone, your plastic water bottles or used motor oil. The app gives you directions to the nearest recycling center and tells you all the materials it accepts.

There are other progressive apps out there. And we’ll be back to tell you about some of our favorites in future posts. Till then, enjoy these three. And remember, the most progressive app for your phone is CREDO Mobile, the company that powers positive change whenever you make a call.