Marketplace

Seventh Generation's greenwashing trifecta

The Greenwash Brigade responds to Jeffrey Hollender's interview with Marketplace's Sarah Gardner. Check back with the blog throughout the day as Hollender joins in the commenting.

Siegelbaum: I like Jeffrey Hollender's "greenwashing trifecta."

Look at the whole company, not the product: This is a pragmatic approach but occasionally a product is so blatantly lipstick-on-a-pig that it speaks volumes about a company's integrity, soundness of judgment and how it balances its green R&D with its sales rhetoric -- the product almost becomes a proxy for the entire company. People do tend to judge books (and wine labels) by their cover. Unfortunately, the product and its accompanying advertising is often all a consumer has to judge a company by unless that company creates an easy gateway to find CSR reports,
G3 reports (from the Global Reporting Initiative) and its behind the scenes political activity. This gets us into superficial greenwashing assessment versus deep corporate values assessment and asset valuation.

Want more juice? Go to Source Watch and what I call the goody bag of corporate research. Listening to the interview I was thinking about the effects of the trade association paradox which makes so many associations poised for obstructionist rhetoric rather than problem solving. That's where Toyota made its terrible misstep in conjunction with its automobile trade associations which lobbied heavily against increasing fuel mileage standards federally. It has cost Toyota its intangible goodwill asset value in the court of public opinion.

Sometimes we get trapped in a greenwashing conversation when what we are really addressing are the core values of a company and the trajectory its heavy engines are on.

Companies are not monoliths. There are small internecine wars waging between investors, innovators in-house and anachronistic Boards clutching to a 1950s business model that is making America uncompetitive. It is this sometimes schizophrenic path that drives greenwashing. We need companies to lead with the model of Corporation2020 and our policy makers to create a sustainable economic development model (Hollender and Seventh Generation support Corporation2020 and provide advisory services to them).

Honest, accurate advertising: Most labels can probably only carry the weight of honesty and not accuracy. The latter would require a few yards of labeling, but advertisements are a different matter. Selling "natural" products is irresistible but legally it means nothing. I'd opt for accuracy on a Web site and settle for honesty on the label. And as we've said before, if you don't have 200 ingredients on a label it's a lot easier to offer both.

Transparency: I wholeheartedly agree. This will be -- and is -- the most difficult step for most companies to make. But it's also where a supportive business and client community -- that recognizes the continuum of change -- can help promote green products and investments.

I like what GE is doing with Ecomagination but what does it say about them when they spend billions fighting to avoid cleaning up PCB-contaminated rivers, one very local to my own history? Is it greenwash? Can a Toyota's Prius be a foil to their lobbying against systematic changes in federal CAFE standards? Where's the beef?

Nicolow: While I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what Hollender said, I can't help wondering if we're asking the right questions.

For Hollender, the question is "how can you evaluate whether a corporation is green," and he proposes three criteria for making that determination (paraphrasing):
1) don't be a hypocrite - you can't sell a green product & a brown product
2) don't lie - don't say a brown product is a green product
3) don't hide - let the public see what you're doing

For Hollender, it's an all-or-nothing proposition. Almost no one would meet Hollender's criteria, including his own Seventh Generation, and Clorox certainly won't get there overnight.

But, as Heidi points out, corporations are not monoliths. I think the question is: how can we rapidly transition to a more sustainable paradigm?

Rather than an all-or-nothing evaluation that no corporations could currently meet, I think we have more hope of catalyzing rapid change by celebrating the responsible products & activities that any corporation is involved in (as well as publicizing the bad). Seventh Generation should be celebrated for their many green products and operations, AND we should give them hell for the products that contained a known carcinogen. Bravo to Toyota for the Prius, but shame on them for fighting stricter CAFE standards. Sustainability is a direction, not a destination, and we need to celebrate any turns in the right direction.

Flisrand: This is a nice shift in sustainability coverage - from sustainable products to companies. Hollender's points strike me as sound. But how many consumers care? And for the few of us who do, how will we find out who "passes"?

This isn't my area of expertise, but I "get" sustainability and I'm smart enough, so I decided to check out Seventh Generation by following Heidi's links.

Folks, finding information turned out to be hard.

After 5 minutes, I realized her link to G3 reports is where to start. After 8 minutes there, I realize the the reports are found somewhere else, Corporate Register.com. When I tried to search for Seventh Generation, I noticed you have to sign up and sign in to search for reports. Going through the sign-up process, I learned I wasn't permitted to use Hotmail, AOL, yahoo! or similar e-mail accounts - what I think of as e-mail for the masses. (Thankfully, .gmail isn't banned.) Next, you have identify why you care, and the drop-down menu doesn't include consumer. The list: "corporate CSR professionals, CSR consultants, government, investors and analysts, media/journalists, NGOs & charities, academics, students, and other/support services." As a consumer, I chose "other" and then I had to select from a second, even more alienating list - think accountants.

I did eventually get through and found the 45-page long Seventh Generation PDF. I started skimming it and things sound pretty good, but I lost interest around page 25. Maybe I can find a more accessible source?

Scroogle, here I come. The first two hits were on the Seventh Generation site (Hollender's blog, and that 45-page report.) Not exactly unbiased. A press release that they'd released their 45-page report. Ah - here's a press release titled "Seventh Generation Honored with the National Corporate stewardship Award from the US Chamber of Commerce." And an Ethical Corporation page too, appreciating that Seventh Generation's 2004 report highlights "deficiencies in its corporate responsibility programmes." That seems useful. Ok, now I'm tired of this.

45 minutes after I'd started looking, I realize that I have slightly more evidence supporting my gut instinct - Seventh Generation seems to be a good company, CSR-wise.

What I actually learned is that using Hollender's criteria is time-consuming, and few consumers (myself included) are likely to bother very often.

• May 5, 2008 by Marketplace staff
• 4 comments

• tags: BP GE Green standards Seventh Generation Toyota

Buying green to avert global warming is like #%*&ing for chastity

Michael Pollan's latest piece in the New York Times Magazine, "Why Bother?" tells us why we should bother.

Pollan parallels Wendell Berry's premise from the 70's that the environmental crisis was essentially a crisis of character. While Berry bemoaned people who were quick to write a check to an environmental organization but slow to reduce their own squandering of fossil fuels, Pollan highlights our current equivalent of "people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos."

The same could be said about our fascination with buying green. Whether greenwash or legitimate environmental claims, I worry that buying our way out of our problems, simply by buying more of the right stuff, is fundamentally flawed.

Pollan instead imagines the sort of nonlinear, unpredictable viral social change that brought down the Eastern bloc, calling for readers to "find one thing to do in your life that doesn't involve spending or voting." For Pollan, it's planting a garden.

"The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world."

Zucchini, anyone?

• April 22, 2008 by Jim Nicolow
• 7 comments

• tags: buying green gardening Michael Pollan

It's not just salmon: take a fresh look at our fishing & eating habits

I was saddened to see today's news that West Coast salmon fishing had to be abruptly halted due to a 93% freefall in the number of spawning fish over the last six years. Just like I've urged a deep look at how our short-term energy decisions have us on the road to a dangerous climate future, near-sighted fishing choices are dooming more species (and the fishermen that depend on them) toward collapse every year.

I just read much of Carl Safina's Song for the Blue Ocean, which is a moving exploration of the world's fishing industry. Safina describes many amazing creatures that land-dwellers like myself only get to see when we're looking down, fork-in-hand, at our dinner plates. The focus of the book is on the bluefin tuna, their dwindling numbers, and the powerful industries from Japan to New England that exacerbate the situation.

The behavior he describes of overfishing until fishery collapse is nothing new. Even Cape Cod couldn't prevent the destruction of its namesake. The National Marine Fisheries Service is mostly led by industry interests who set annual quotas that are too high (and often unenforced) to allow fish to recover from the overfishing of the last few decades.

With a world human population still on the rise, the strain on natural resources continues to increase. Now that food prices are causing riots throughout the developing world, it is clear to see that these strains seriously threaten both the health of the world's poor and the security of home countries. This situation may not get under control unless we quickly stop the growth of current food-to-fuels programs like corn ethanol in the US and we become educated food consumers - lowering our consumption of fish that are not responsibly caught and of meat since it's so much more efficient for us to get energy directly from vegetables (notice I didn't say everyone has to be vegetarian - but lowering consumption is a great strategy to help the poor not have to compete with so many cows and pigs for basic foods).

While part of the recent decline in Sacramento is due to natural variations, I hope any West Coast fishing interests that lobbied for high salmon quotas these past few years take their folly to heart. If they had lowered their hauls they probably wouldn't have had to completely halt their operations this year (and now taxpayers are gonna have to bail them out). So, what's best for jobs? A sustainable environment that breeds abundance and fishermen (or loggers -- you name it) who are patient enough to understand our world's natural limits.

We didn't learn enough from the tragedies of the bison and the passenger pigeon. We haven't yet learned enough from the collapse of most of the predatory fish of our wild oceans to set up the policies and consumer habits that foster recovery for those that haven't yet fully collapsed.

The question is, are we smart enough as a nation and a global community to finally take this story of the Chinook salmon's collapse to heart and lower the quotas for fishing across the board to levels that allow a recovery in populations and a larger yield for the fishermen of tomorrow?

• April 11, 2008 by Dennis Markatos
• 1 comments

• tags: energy fishing oceans salmon sustainability

Does green travel offset emissions.... or just your guilt?

Travel to an eco-resort abroad and mitigate guilt over the GHG emissions used to get there all at the same time! Ah, the confusing lexicon of ecotourism and green travel might be just enough to get me to visit this website on environmentally-friendly hotelsbut I sure wouldn't rely on it. I'll get to that shortly.

Regardless of where we travel, environmental impacts follow our every step. Common sense says the farther you jet from home, the greater the impact. This impact may include impact on the climate not just from all air travel, but from the jet YOU are flying on. (This report (PDF) explains how jets impact climate change through something called "radiative forcing.") Now that's scary. Ecotourism and green travel are implicitly about impacts, opportunity and action related to SCALE and DIMENSIONS of responsibility.

--GHG Emissions: Greenhouse gas emissions from any mode of travel (an issue of policy, particularly that of the airlines where industry analysts recommend a separate surcharge that can be paid voluntarily by the traveler and if not, 100% of the tab is picked up by the airline itself)

--Site Specific Impacts: This is where credible conservation efforts in lodging can make a difference (water, energy, landscaping, material use and disposal)

--Site Location and Culture: Implications of the lodging site and how we interact with the local community (with respect or with bare chested plunder?)

You can stay in a spiffy lodging that has undertaken scores of environmental initiatives but how does this balance play out if it's located in a place where raw sewage is dumped into tropical waters and toxic trash is burned? It's not just the eco-lodge that matters but the implicit values, plans and actions of the host community and country. Regardless of what you find, speak up and reward good lodges and contact local/regional tourism agencies if you don't like you see -- the industry is acutely sensitive to guest opinion.

In many ways it doesn't matter what label you put on lodgings that are adopting a continuum of green programs as long as they are doing something and are not overstating its accomplishments. The problems with a site like environmentallyfriendlyhotels.com are many:

1. The definitions bear no resemblance to any credible standard (Green Seal, Green Leaf, Green Globe 21, ASEAN Green Hotel Standard, ISO14001/4) and are vague enough to open the door wide open for greenwashing: the research is based on standard web searches from what I can see and I know from my own work that most lodgings do not disclose the nitty-gritty of their engineering and other progress for a few reasons (time, don't think guests care, not considered their core mission in many cases or not practiced in explaining what their programs mean); and

2. The properties are not audited and end up on the site with mere self-congratulation on a worst case basis- you say so and I believe it.

You would be better off going to the venerable Ecotourism Society or the research site intute: social sciences which has a smorgasbord of legitimate sustainable tourism links such as Planeta and Sustainable Travel International.

Happy Trails!

• April 10, 2008 by Heidi Siegelbaum
• 6 comments

• tags: certifications ecotourism green travel sustainable tourism

Greenwashing is a gateway drug

In Amy Westervelt's recent Sustainable Industries interview with L. Hunter Lovins, Lovins makes the case that greenwashing is good. "Hypocrisy is the first step to real change." I'm inclined to agree.

Greenwashing is a symptom of the business community's recognition that the public is demanding that they do better, and prepared to reward those that do. The quickest response is simply to re-brand / spin your company to make it look greener (greenwash). Lovins cites General Electric's "ecomagination" ad campaign as an example of profound greenwashing, with GE basically taking their existing products and slapping an 'eco' label on them (remember the dancing elephant?).

This is rampant in the building products market as well. A roofing product manufacturer recently asked me how they could make their product "look more green." Their marketing materials touted the environmental attributes of their product (greenwash), and he wanted input on whether they got the spin right for architects. I resisted the urge to choke him, and instead encouraged him to deliberately asses the environmental impacts of their current operations and identify strategies for reducing/improving that impact. Identify some areas for improvement (less toxic materials, reduce waste, etc.), make improvements, and then tout those improvements once there is a story to tell.

The greenwashing is free, but once you hold yourself up as 'green(er)', increased scrutiny follows. Plus, no one likes to be a hypocrite. Once you say you're doing it, there's a tendency to start doing it. In GE's case, Lovins points out that once GE saw their 'eco' products had twice the sales volume of the regular products, "all of a sudden a company without a green bone in its body has one--attached to its wallet."

• April 5, 2008 by Jim Nicolow
• 0 comments

• tags: architecture building GE Lovins marketing

Baking soda is all you need to make your own green cleaning products

I attended a green cleaning party today with a group of voluble, smart women as part of a national Safe Cleaning Products Initiative sponsored by Women's Voices for the Earth .The campaign provided mixing directions, labels and green cleaning party kits free of charge . Last July Marketplace aired a story about WVE's rising voice against the effect of toxic chemicals on women in particular.

The lines are always the same: no way to find out what's in it (you can if the company doesn't claim all components as trade secrets) and that consumer safety is "our highest priority" as Procter & Gamble states. Well, if consumer safety was the priority of these manufacturers, then perhaps there wouldn't be 200 ingredients in a household cleaner-- the longer the list, the bigger trouble you are in. It also struck me as "odd" that the reason ingredients aren't listed is because the law doesn't require it. What are they hiding then?

WVE's web site reveals that American women's breast milk is so fully laced with synthetic chemicals that if bottled, most of it would not pass FDA regulations. Check out the Collaborative on Health and the Environment and Breast Cancer Fund if you really want to get riled up.

After getting a house tour of how to clean, we paired up with newly found friends and large containers of baking soda, distilled white vinegar, olive oil, castile soap, essential oils, borax and hydrogen peroxide. In minutes we made a family of cleaning products containing perhaps four ingredients max-- not the 20 (or 200) in your synthetic products-- using mainly salad dressing ingredients and baking soda. I tested one as soon as I got home and our windows were never cleaner. Corporate cage fight: Clorox versus Church & Dwight Co, Inc., owners of the Arm & Hammer baking soda empire.

Companies continue to make consumer products that are not tested for safety, will never be tested for safety, and don't have to be tested for safety. Oh, I almost forgot-- they also don't have to label the products fully and the constituents are often protected by trade secret claims your tax dollars pay to protect.

Truthful and accurate labeling should be the currency of democracy. The Consumer Product Safety Commission only regulates and requires labeling for household cleaners based on these hazard categories: toxic, flammable, caustic, irritant, sensitizer, carcinogen, nerve or reproductive toxin. The big but is there are thousands of chemicals that have other human health effects, plus the law doesn't cover "fragrance" which can itself contains tens and sometimes hundreds of toxic chemicals... so basically the law is meaningless since it left the back door wide open... really wide.

I had boatloads of fun in this spring cleaning protest against corporations and their failure to protect human health, label products clearly and honestly address the core of what's at play in toys, personal care products and cleaning chemicals:

We are engaged in a very dangerous, long-term experiment with our health and economy in a post-WWII love affair with synthetic chemicals that humans and other parts of nature are simply not designed to deal with -- period.

I hate to sound so naive but I can't reach any conclusion other than that quarterly earnings trump virtually every other value under consideration, including your health. Because if it was otherwise, you would be able to read a label, understand it, and feel good about what's inside.

• March 23, 2008 by Heidi Siegelbaum
• 8 comments

• tags: cleaning products

Ecopods are burying the greenwash

Did you ever hear that joke -- that the quickest way to significantly reduce your environmental footprint is to die?

However, while death is a natural part of ecosystems, with dead organisms consumed by other organisms (waste equals food), dead humans are typically embalmed with a toxic cocktail of chemicals and then entombed in nesting boxes of concrete, plastic, and precious hardwoods.

Marketplace ran a story about an 'eco-friendly' coffin producer in the UK who is producing recycled paper coffins to reduce the environmental impact of funerals. While the coffin is indeed part of the story, shipping a $3,000 (recycled) coffin 5,000+ miles to reduce a burial's environmental impact feels a bit like selecting the rapidly-renewable bamboo trim package to reduce the environmental impact of your hummer.

The embalming fluid is the elephant in the room. It is estimated that over 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde-containing embalming fluid are buried each year in the US.

Green Burials, or Natural Burials, offer the opportunity of preparing the body without toxic embalming fluids. Refrigeration is typically substituted to slow the decomposition process, with the body then buried in a biodegradable casket or simple shroud, and typically interred in a natural burial site serving as a wildlife preserve. Home funerals, which often use dry ice to preserve the body for viewing, offer an opportunity to further reduce impacts and personalize the experience.

The Green Burial Council has developed standards for Conservation Burial Grounds and Natural Burial Grounds, as well as a directory of green burial providers and resources about the environmental impacts of burials.

• March 19, 2008 by Jim Nicolow
• 7 comments

• tags: burials footprint

Green homes - speedy sales in a slow market?

For a year, I've been trying to convince Minnesota's affordable home builders concerned about a slowing market what Greg Pinn, a San Jose home-builder, already knows. "When a buyer has a choice between a home that isn't energy-efficient and...one that [is], the choice will be very easy."

In his Orchard Heights subdivision, seven of nine available green homes sold the first weekend they were available. He added that it only works when you're comparing apples to apples - homes that buyers can afford, with good layouts, in the right location.

While the marketability of green homes seems like a gimme this year, the details of the story raise several questions:

Can 3,600 square foot homes be green? I argue "no." Bigger homes take more energy to heat and cool, tend to house more continuously electricity-sipping gadgets, and lots more stuff. 3,600 is more like "huge."

Is Orchard Heights, the focus of this article, green? Who knows! There is no evidence that the homes achieve LEED standards. The marketing materials lack mention of LEED or any other verifiable benchmark, and the touted energy efficiency features (see page 10, PDF) list the super-basic: programmable setback thermostat, full weatherstripping on exterior doors, and code-mandated dual pane windows and water-saving shower heads. My Greenwash Alert is howling.

Does it matter if there are multiple green home programs in a single housing market? Within reason, it's fine. Different programs reach different home buyers. Nationally, LEED, with its relatively costly process, targets top performers. Green Communities has affordable housing covered. There's a gap in the middle which is either filled by local programs or still up for grabs. (The National Association of Home Builders is trying). All help educate the market and expand capacity for building green.

Do buyers have the choice to buy green? In most locations, no. There are individual green homes scattered about and a few green projects, but in my dense, popular, environmentally aware neighborhood, I can't find anything that meets both my location and sustainability expectations.

Why does solar installer Aaron Nitzkin of OCR Solar & Roofing predict the percent of a household's electricity their system will provide? Ok - so I asked this one as an excuse to share a really cool chart. Habits and choices make a big difference in how much electricity people use, so when Nitzkin says that the Orchard Heights systems will "meet 40 to 60 percent of a homeowner's electricity needs," he hides the importance of individual choices. Each bar in the chart on the left (data from the Sacramento Municipal Utility District) shows electricity usage in one of the 11 homes in a different subdivision. All of the homes are identical with the same photo voltaic arrays. The only difference is the occupants. As a result of how families live in these homes, some homes produce power and get checks from SMUD... and others pay $100 a month.

• March 12, 2008 by Janne K. Flisrand
• 5 comments

• tags: green building LEED real estate

Climate-friendly investing... with nuclear?

As I've been trying to be green in my investments (and mostly failing), this morning's Marketplace Money story by Sarah Gardner felt very familiar. Then... I noticed the recently familiar question about whether nuclear power is green popped up - and that in this article, Paul Hilton suggested a qualified no. A quick Google (or Green Maven) search illustrates the avid debate within the environmental community about this, and that long-time environmental leaders are coming down on both sides.

Heck, the topic is so loaded, that the two Wikipedia articles (one and two) I glanced at in hopes of finding something less biased warned that "The neutrality of this article is disputed."

Personally, I'm not sure which side is the greenwash - decrying eco-friendly funds that include nuclear energy, or declaring nuclear is green.

I've got a short list of compelling pro arguments:

1. A carbon footprint that's on par with other renewables
2. Reliable electricity

And, a longer list of con arguments:

1. Higher cost than the alternatives
2. Solutions for waste are totally lacking
3. A host of security problems, including terrorism and accidents
4. Planning, permitting, and building a plant takes an eternity, which means no quick response to more and more pressing climate changes
5. Centralized generation exacerbates problems we already have in getting electricity from where it's created to where we need it, and don't support distributed generation that would create more resilient infrastructure
6. Mining fuel is environmentally destructive
7. Uranium (and other nuclear fuels) are not infinite... will we someday find ourselves at "peak uranium" if we grow dependent upon it for our power generation?

My gut says "bad idea," my head says "I don't like it, but I'm not sure." Brigadiers, readers - your thoughts? Can an eco-fund include nuclear power?

• March 2, 2008 by Janne K. Flisrand
• 7 comments

• tags: nuclear power

Biofuels' virgin flight an important step

As the price of oil passes $100/barrel, motorists aren’t the only ones that suffer. So does the airline industry, which has relied on cheap fuel to get people where they want to go quickly and affordably. Now that the price of oil has quadrupled in the last six years, alternative fuels like biofuels may help to keep oil from getting even more expensive. And since the combustion of oil for flights is a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, biofuels may help mitigate climate change as well. Thus Virgin Atlantic planned this week’s flight many months ago as a pioneer to help usher in a greener airline industry.

But recent studies, including one by my colleagues at Princeton have shown that the push into biofuels created some unintended consequences and production processes do not yet achieve the climate mitigation we all hoped for. The reliance on edible crops like corn for ethanol in the US has contributed to rising global food prices. And it turns out that the cultivation process for our corn, its refinery into ethanol, its transportation, and the lower energy content make it mostly on par with using gasoline in terms of emissions. So, the current generation of biofuels is not the silver bullet many hoped it would be. But does that make Virgin Atlantic’s flight just a publicity stunt?

I say no – it is a crucial precedent that shows the world that airplanes can use biofuels to power their flights. Now it is our responsibility to support the development of next-generation biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol off of bio-wastes like what Vinod Khosla supports in Georgia. But we also must not trick ourselves that biofuels can solve our cost and climate concerns. Biofuels can only supply a small part of our current demand of liquid fuels. We need much more efficiency in our vehicles, plug-in hybrids to run on wind and solar, and better public transit like Japan’s bullet trains to compete with carbon intensive air travel. Of course we shouldn’t look to an airline to stop people from flying so much – but we can support them when they take precedent-setting steps forward within their business.

We should put a moratorium on new production capacity of food-competing biofuels until the inflation of food prices gets under control – but let’s also recognize the transformation that took place as average people now see they can run their vehicles on something other than gasoline. And it’s not like Virgin Atlantic pioneered the first coal-to-liquids flight, which would double the carbon dioxide emissions of jet fuel.

Our efforts at mitigation will inevitably be a mix of successes and failures. It is up to us to try to anticipate the unintended consequences of alternatives to unsustainable fossil fuels. As long as we don’t have an attitude that stifles innovation and sincere efforts, we can together solve the global warming crisis upon us.

• February 27, 2008 by Dennis Markatos
• 8 comments

• tags: airplane travel biofuels