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Save the Earth: Greenwashing or Going Green?

KermitThese days being Green sells. This makes me happy, moreover, this makes my inner nine-year-old happy who was campaigning to save the whales on the local news long before it was cool. However, as Kermit pointed out, being Green isn’t easy, and sometimes, it might not be as profitable as shareholders demand that it be. Especially since being Green has become lumped in with better labor practices and company ethics.

Say I decided that I wanted to start mass selling warming cat beds, I would need:

1. Investors to fund my project
2. Materials to make my cat beds out of
3. A design team to create the product
4. A marketing team to create the packaging and branding messages
5. A factory to produce the product
6. A factory to produce the packaging
7. A warehouse to store my packaged cat beds
8. Shipping to get cat beds to warehouse and then to stores/customers
9. Stores and web site to sell them in

(Okay, I’m sure I forgot something. But this is simplified.)

So, let’s say I make my cat beds out of 100% organic cotton and use an energy saving method to warm the beds. Great, my cat beds are Green, right?

Wrong, when they travel really inefficiently by jet from my factory in China because I have to meet deadlines. Wrong, when I use non-recyclable new plastics in packaging. Wrong, when I mass market them at Wal-Mart and pay my own design team substandard wages so they have to work at Wal-Mart selling my cat beds on the weekends to supplement their income.

While this is a massive simplification of how hard going Green actually is, it’s not an uncommon practice for companies to say they’re Green and then leave some pretty big carbon footprints in other areas or with other products. This is also known as Greenwashing and it all comes down to how much money a company can make by advertising it as Green.

Though my cat warming beds are trying to Green and hopefully getting incentives to become Green in other areas besides materials, they aren’t quite there yet. They aren’t completely Greenwashing, but the packaging needs to be clear that the materials in the product and it’s function are Green while the rest of it may not be.

Traditionally, Greenwashing was associate with more blatant profit mongering or anti-environmental acts being passed off as Green. However, there’s been a move these days to say, “Hey, but what about…” And sites like GoodGuide have popped up to help the prosumer make a decision about how truly Green a product is. Because alone we don’t have the resources to figure it out, but together, we can stand up and say that while being Green isn’t easy, it’s time to start.

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No Dogs in the Grocery Store

A month ago, I was standing in Safeway, buying my tofu and potato chips, and a woman walked in carrying her lapdog. Freshly bronzened and wearing track shorts, I guessed that she was a high schooler. I glared at her.

She walked passed the deli — all the fresh meats and cheese out on display — and toward the freezer section. I kept glaring.

Clearly, her soul reflected my evil eye. Some fairy must’ve blessed her at birth.

So instead I said, really loudly, “Who the hell brings their dog into the grocery store?”

My words reached her ears and she quickly left with her dog and let her friends pick up her groceries. I could tell that the grocer, who was ringing up my food, was relieved.

Why can’t you bring your lapdog into a grocery store?

Because it’s unsanitary.

Because it’s a health code violation.

Because the store could be shut down because of your dog and then you couldn’t by your energy bars and laxatives anyway.

Why don”t the store employees say anything?

Because the customer is always right. The grocery store clerk knows that one bad complaint equals the end of his/her job and the ability to pay for rent, cell phones, or electricity.

My mom manages a salon with a retail store inside. I asked her what she does when someone brings his/her dog into the store: Nothing, she said, not unless a fellow customer complains. This is despite that fact that my mom’s work would be shut down if a health inspector found a dog in it.

So don’t be a jerk. Leave your dog at home or in the car. Take your dog to a dog park. Your dog will like it more than waiting for you to choose between no fat or low-fat yogurt. Don’t ruin someone’s livelihood because you don’t think Cuddles is a bother in your handbag.

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The Green Pope, not a new superhero movie

Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday that mankind’s “insatiable consumption” has scarred the Earth and squandered its resources, telling followers that taking care of the planet is vital to humanity.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I think this is beyond wonderful for the Pope to address environmental destruction. While Catholicism may be losing ground in the United States, it is still huge in other countries, especially say down in South America where rain forests are being bulldozed by the acre. I also think it’s a great move for Catholicism back to the social justice-type movements it started doing in Vatican II and were somewhat halted by the more conservative Pope John Paul II.

The social justice movement was always something I greatly admire about Catholicism and while, despite my disagreements with some of the church’s doctrine, I’m more likely to be okay with helping clean a kitchen at my maternal grandparents’ Catholic church when they were getting ready to house the homeless than say hanging decorations for a church social at my father’s Lutheran one.

I think environmentalism is a great topic for them to take as well in that it’s very PR-friendly and not as controversial for them to take on, since I don’t expect the Catholic church to stand up for gay marriage any time soon.

Plus, churches have such a great power to install morals and ethics into people, making the old learn new tricks and young children gain them, and it’s nice to see a truly worthwhile cause of our planet. Instead of just telling followers that life will be better in heaven, it’s time to start making Earth a little more heavenly.

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Baby Shit

The subject isn’t pretty. It isn’t new. And it’s always there. Garbage and more garbage, just piling up. I grew up down the street from a landfill, which sounds so much better than a hole in the ground where people dump their tons and tons of garbage.

Currently, I share recycle and garbage bins with my landlords. My landlords have a year old baby. They seem to think it’s perfectly acceptable to put used baby diapers into the recycle bin because they are either too lazy to walk one foot to the garbage bin or somehow think that plastic baby diapers full of hazardous waste are recyclable. (I try not to dig too far into the psychology of my landlords because that’s a long and scary road.) I think about how their grandchildren, who hopefully won’t be born for another 25+ years, will be building their houses on piles of baby shit.

Their complete and total waste forces me think about garbage. It makes me think about how there are 6+ billion people on this planet and a heck of a lot of use were raised in plastic baby diapers. I wonder just how many people in Seattle are trying to recycle their babies’ diapers too. But it’s not just the plastic diapers. It’s the people and the consuming and the useless toxic waste. It’s that there are too many people on this planet, but everyone seems to feel entitled to pass along his/her DNA just because Tab A fits into Slot B or knowing how to use a turkey baster.

I know, I’m of the not having children, and if I do, there’s this thing called adoption, mindset. One of those plastic-baggie-washing self-righteous recycle and reuse freaks. I was 7-years-old and guilting my mother to use cloth diapers on my newborn youngest brother. I called her out again a few weekends with her love of paper plates.

I think about the company I work for and all the non-recyclable plastic packaging and the shipping and factory waste. I think about Wal-Marts and Urban Assault Vehicles (SUVs) and how no wonder the economies falling apart since most places seem to be run by college frat boys who majored in binge drinking. I drive myself nuts seeing broken down houses I’ll never be able to afford and front yards covered with invasive ivy and blackberries.

So I stop. I put on my blinders. I recycle my soy milk containers and turn off the lights. I stop listening to NPR for a week. I try to ignore the world that I can’t control and the people I can’t legal assault for trying to recycle baby shit. I leave an offering for Darwin and hope that the human race kills itself before it destroys Earth beyond repair.