Open the Door to Greener Living…

Every day you hear the word “green” tossed around as a marketing buzzword. It’s true, there are companies that slap the green label on a bottle, with the sole purpose of selling more to their target consumer (the consumer that wants to feel better about the purchases they make and their impact on the environment). But there are also corporations that truly care about the environment and incorporate green living into their everyday and long term practices. Recently, the trend has been increasing exponentially for companies to use what they call “ecolabels”—essentially a stamp recognizing that they are green. However, consumers are easily lured into purchasing “green” products from non-green companies because some companies have their own ecolabels that they affix to their merchandise specifying that they are green according to … well, themselves. Some of these companies actually come out with an occasional green product for the consumer, but they don’t use environmentally friendly practices to manufacture goods or socially responsible practices to run their companies. For example, take the latest popular line of household cleaners, “Clorox Greenworks.” Clorox really is dedicated to their consumer, but are they dedicated to actually sustainable living? Their organization has a line of green cleaners to target a particular market, but the rest of their cleaners are manufactured the way they always have been (for their other markets). This is not a company that focuses on green as a function of their values, but rather green as a function of their markets. Adept marketing to enforce their green strategy takes care of the fact that the company itself is not necessarily sustainable. On the other hand, take a look a Burt’s Bees, a company where their founder is currently living in a refurbished turkey coop, to save energy, and live sustainably. Perhaps the coop lifestyle is a bit extreme, but Burt’s Bees has phenomenal environmental practices. They started locally with all natural and local products manufactured on a small scale. And before the boom of green marketing even came about, they established their business with green products and a sustainable strategy. Today, they import some of the bees wax from Africa, due to the mass quantities they use for development, but by 2020, they plan on being 100% natural and sustainable once again. Another new market for sustainability and environmentally friendly practices is the non-profit sector. Medical Teams International (formerly Northwest Medical Teams), works world-wide in disaster locations to serve people. They are dedicated to helping people in some of the poorest nations in the world survive natural disasters and in times of war and displacement. How do they do this so effectively? Through sustainability. Medical Teams International focuses much of their business efforts on creating a sustainable environment, by which they teach people in the locations they are serving the practices that they came to help with. Then the people being assisted may turn around and help others in their home country. In addition to this form of sustainability, though, this non-profit uses environmentally sustainable practices to reduce waste and recycle as much as they can. Their shipping site boasts some of the greatest recycling practices in the world. In order to operate, they receive millions of dollars worth of medical product donations every year. Many of the donations are broken, incomplete, or sometimes overstocked, but they use absolutely everything. If something is nearing expiration, they put it on priority. If something is broken, they have trained volunteers to fix it. And for the various unusable parts on site, they engineer them to create whole products that can be useful. They do this with everything from wheel chairs to first aid kits. On the occasion they find something they simply cannot use, they re-recycle it to another organization. All of these practices cut cost, waste, and make a very small impact on the environment. So, when you are out there looking around for green products, consider the companies that you purchase from. If “going green” is an important factor in your purchases, do the research and understand what companies are “green” and what companies ecolabel solely for the purpose of marketing. There are trusted outside businesses that work for the purpose of ecolabeling only products specially tested and approved, but primarily, it is key for you, the consumer, to be educated on your purchasing decisions and understand what it means to “incorporate” the green life. Stop by next week to find out how GreenCupboards stands to make a change in the ecolabeling environment, and what you can do to avoid getting tangled in the web of marketing schemes.