What’s happening to the Green Revolution, anyway? The supertrend shows some signs of a slow fizzle. Yes, consumers say they are willing to pay as much as 10 cents more on the dollar for environmentally safe products–but at the same time voters are striking down major environmental initiatives across the country, including California’s intimidatingly complex Big Green package. Businesses like McDonald’s are straining to prove their environmentalist credentials, but 47 percent of consumers have come to dismiss environmental claims as mere gimmickry, according to a study to be released next month by polling firm Environmental Research Associates of Princeton, N.J. As Kermit the Frog sings, it’s not easy being green.
That hasn’t stopped a flood of green goods. Those products are being introduced at 20 times the rate of regular fare, according to the “JWT Greenwatch” report by J. Walter Thompson. While many products are tainted by hype, more and more companies are looking at environmental action seriously–and prof itably. “It’s no longer lip service but for real,” says Thomas Kucz marski, president of the Chicago-based consulting firm Kuczmarski & Associates. “We’ve moved from environmental concerns down to hard-core business opportunities.” Says Patrick Noonan, president of The Conservation Fund, “Environmental economics is the whole next field.”
Companies are finding plenty of ways to go green. Many of the changes concern new product, such as 3M’s new recycled-paper Post-it notes. Others put action behind their products: Esteem Lauder encourages buyers of its natural Origins cosmetics to return the recyclable-glass empties to the counter. Still others are green inside and out. Patagonia, the mailorder clothing firm, printed its fall catalog on recycled paper, and in past years has donated 10 percent of pretax profits to more than 300 environmental groups. Patagonia tries to make its headquarters environmentally sound, too, screwing energy efficient light bulbs into sockets and using cloth diapers at the on-site day-care center.
Increasingly, companies are joining forces with environmentalists. McDonald’s turned to the Environmental Defense Fund to help clean up its “McToxics” image. With an estimated 11 million foam cartons tossed out each day, McDonald’s had become a symbol of the throwaway society. Now the company plans to use paper wrappers: “We listened to our customers, we listened to environmental experts,” says McDonald’s U.S.A. president Edward H. Rensi. Arm Hammer, which has pumped up its Canadian sales by touting baking soda as a natural product, consults with several green groups. “We don’t do anything without talking to them,” says Brian Thomlison, director of environmental management.
Some team-ups are a straightforward business proposition: Clevelandbased American Greetings entered into a license agreement with the National Wildlife Federation to manufacture nature cards on recycled paper. Others join formerly bitter antagonists. Environmental groups and utilities have worked to pass state regulations that create a hefty financial incentive for helping customers to conserve energy. The partnerships are still controversial: some environmentalists accuse the collaborators of selling out, and I many businesses shun the greens. One business leader in the waste industry I grumbles that “it’s to [the environmentalists’] advantage … to keep the problem alive to force societal change.”
The green boom has brought a lot of clutter along with it. Of course, there’s the problem of hype–such as claims by Mobil Chemical and First Brands, since rescinded, that Hefty and Glad plastic bags are degradable. But even well-intended products run up against conflicting concepts of greenness. Recycling some materials may be good for the solid-waste problem but bad for energy efficiency. Paper may have 100 percent recycled fiber content but its manufacturing process may release dioxin.
Even the efforts to simplify things have gotten complicated. A product seal of approval like Germany’s Blue Angel should help, but there is a crowd of competing seals–10 at last count (chart). While stores like Wal-Mart use in-house green labels, environmentalists are looking toward three seals: Green Cross, which verifies specific product claims, and two soon-to-beintroduced labels, Good Earthkeeping (from Good Housekeeping) and Green Seal. Earth Day chairperson Denis Hayes is hoping his Green Seal will set criteria for “environmentally wise” products “analyzed cradle to grave.”
Sound confusing? It is, even for the pros. Green is a moving target, says Katherine Tiddens, whose soon-to-open Terra Verde in Manhattan will offer goods from paper to low-toxicity building materials. Businesses like Tiddens’s–such as the Boston area’s Green Planet and Houston’s Earthies–are making money by helping consumers find their way. So do catalogs like Seventh Generation and consumer guides like Shopping for a Better World, produced by the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities. And consumers need help: a new survey by the Council on Plastics and Packaging in the Environment shows that fewer than a quarter even know what “environmentally friendly” means.
Despite the boom, environmentalists were shaken by the loss of green initiatives. Why did they lose so big? “The question is, will the public spend whatever it takes?” says Barry Mannis, vice president for environmental services at Morgan Stanley. “For the moment, the answer is no.” Some say recession jitters made voters reject measures that might have put a drag on the economy. Others blame high antigreen campaign spending by the business community–or, as in California, even animosity toward one of the measure’s sponsors, state assemblyman Tom Hayden. But perhaps the answer is more personal. Americans like to choose safer products, but resent having choices taken away by government–and sometimes you want to eat a burger, however it’s wrapped. Green thinking is certainly here to stay, but the election upsets can only add pressure to the delicate relationship between environmentalists and the private sector.
Many of the buzzwords of environmental correctness are confusing at best. A sampling:
Green Seal: A planned “cradle to grave” product-evaluation system from Mr. Earth Day, Denis Hayes.
Green Cross: The company independently verifies manufacturers’ specific environmental claims for products or packaging.
Blue Angel: With 12 years of evaluating products in Germany, this venerable environmentally correct seal is a model for newcomers.
Recyclable: Don’t confuse this with “recycled.” The material might be used again, but only after reaching a (sometimes rare) recycling facility.
Degradable: This should mean “breaks down”–but a well-maintained landfill doesn’t let in the air and sun that allow the process.
title: “It S Not Easy Being Green” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-05” author: “Willie Ciocca”
The Waste Technologies Industries plant in East Liverpool, Ohio, is no ordinary incinerator. It is a $160 million complex intended to burn 60,000 tons a year of toxic waste from industries all over the country-or possibly, given that the operator is a subsidiary of a Swiss engineering firm, the world. It has advanced pollution-abatement equipment and smokestack monitors that can send data on emissions minute by minute to Environmental Protection Agency officials. It has created more than 100 jobs in a rust-belt town so depressed that its population has fallen by 50 percent in a decade, to 13,000. That explains why many in the community were outraged when Gore said that he would seek to deny WTI an operating permit until Congress investigates the plant’s safety. “Without WTI, we’re dusters, we’re gone,” says Dick Kelly, 50, a former steelworker who lost his job 12 years ago and now sells insurance.
But the plant also sits on the Ohio River flood plain, atop two aquifers and only 300 feet from the nearest homes. These conditions were legal when the plant first applied for a permit more than a decade ago, but would disqualify it under a more recent law that requires at least 2,000 feet of separation from houses. And that explains why other citizens were lining up last week to spend a night in jail as a badge of honor in the fight against WTI. “I’m prepared to do whatever it takes to stop WTI,” said Edith Barnhart, who was awaiting trial for criminal trespass after being arrested with 74 others in a protest outside the plant last month. She is 68.
The campaign to stop the incinerator has been orchestrated by Greenpeace and by Hugh Kaufman, an EPA whistle-blower. Kaufman says he has found irregularities in the plant’s permits dating back to 1981, when a state agency took the land by eminent domain for use as a “port”-three months after the agency had agreed to lease the property to Waste Technologies for a toxic-waste disposal site. EPA higher-ups concede technical errors in the permit process, but consider them moot now. Kaufman thinks it will be all to the good if the WTI case puts the fear of God, or public-interest lawyers, into businessmen inclined to play fast and loose with permits. But he sees a more urgent issue. “The children in the area … will be paying the price for their whole lives so that a few good men can get paid burger-flipper salaries to poison their neighborhoods,” Kaufman says. “East Liverpool is being treated by big-money men as a Third World country.”
WTI officials, on the contrary, try to leave the impression that its smokestack emissions will be as invigorating as a breeze from an orange grove. Officials assert that emissions will be far below state limits-.038 tons per year of lead, for instance, versus a state limit of 2.35 tons. A coal-burning power plant in nearby Shippingport, Pa., “puts out more emissions in one hour than we put out of certain substances in a year,” says WTI spokeswoman Julia Bircher. “If other industries in this valley had to meet our emissions, they would close down tomorrow.” Greenpeace, working from figures in the plant’s permits, charges that WTI’s figures are lies, and the likelier numbers are much higher-as much as 4.7 tons of lead. And incinerators put out compounds that aren’t regulated at all, and for which no standards exist-but which may also be harmful. Ultimately, Greenpeace takes the position that there are no safe levels of emissions, that incineration is an inherently dangerous technology that ought never be used. But this is also how ardent environmentalists feel about landfills, leaving unspoken the implication that the industries that generate these wastes-chemical, pottery, paint and pharmaceutical companies-ought to be doing something else entirely.
Meanwhile, grandparents in BAN THE BURN T shirts await their jail time and WTI supporters have rallied, 700 strong, in the East Liverpool Motor Lodge. The company, racing the clock against a new administration, continues testing and adjusting its burners, preparing for a seven-day test burn, which could take place early in January. And an administration committed to saving both the environment and the jobs of places like East Liverpool, Ohio, faces the first, but by no means the last, test of how to reconcile those goals.
title: “It S Not Easy Being Green” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-01” author: “Waltraud Calvillo”
Actually “sweeping through” is a bit of an exaggeration. After all, when you’re the Green Party candidate for president–president of the United States, at least–you don’t so much as “sweep through” anything. You slink through, virtually unnoticed.
Not even the weather cooperated with the Green Party last week in New York. The plan was to hold a press conference in front of Times Square’s renowned Army recruiting station, but it was pouring. The Greens, of course, were happy to make their speeches in the rain–Greens don’t fight Mother Nature, after all–but they quickly realized that the only reporters who like to stand in a deluge work for The Weather Channel.
So the press conference was convened under the awning of the now-defunct WWF Experience theme restaurant across from the recruiting station. The few of us that did attend were lucky that the WWF Experience had gone belly up so that we could actually convene under the awning (although I worried that holding a press conference in front of a shuttered business would make the Greens seem anti-capitalist. Then again, perhaps Cobb was showing support for the free market, which has clearly rejected restaurants that too closely resemble souvenir stands).
Not that it really mattered, of course. At the appointed hour, the entire press contingent consisted of an intern from CNN and me. Not even the New York Times, whose front door is located less than 100 steps from the WWF Experience awning, could be troubled to send a reporter to listen to what the Greenies were saying.
The lack of media buzz was only one part of the “Not Ready for Prime Time” quality of the Green campaign. The other was David McReynolds. In his rumpled seersucker jacket, pink shirt and more pens in his breast pocket than a Hewlett Packard programmer, McReynolds was easily mistaken for the kind of guy I avoid on the subway–but it turned out, he’s running for Senate on the Green ticket. (Or trying to, at least. Getting on the ballot in New York State is about as easy as carving a turkey with those lame plastic spoons they give you at the deli–while swimming!).
McReynolds made a quick comment on the 9/11 commission report–hence the initial choice of the Army recruiting station as a backdrop–but wisely stopped talking (I knew I liked him for some reason) to introduce Cobb. Now, I’ve covered many political rallies in my day. Typically, when someone is introduced with the words, “And now I’d like to bring on the next president of the United States…,” there’s a very large applause. The bad news (for Cobb) was that there was not even a smattering. The good news (for me) is that there was no syrupy campaign theme song like “Don’t Stop (Thinkin’ About Tomorrow).”
But neither that, nor the meager media presence, dampened Cobb’s immediate launch into bold campaign-rallyspeak: “This recruiting station is taking young people and turning them into fodder for an illegal and immoral war in Iraq! Support our troops–bring them home! We need to end our addiction to fossil fuels, which is driving us to war in the Middle East. We need to build schools instead of prisons. Health care is a fundamental human right! We need a living wage, not a minimum wage! And we need to repeal the Patriot Act!”
Again, there was no applause. There was a guy making a cellphone call (“Can you hear me? I’m losing you”). And the beer bum was uninspired. Not even Roosterman, a legendary Times Square figure who crows and makes crude sexual gestures, slowed down to listen to Cobb. A family of four stopped to stay out of the rain. I asked them if they liked what Cobb was saying. They said they hadn’t been listening. “We love George Bush,” the father said. “Now, we have to get to Madame Tussaud’s.” (Hmm, isn’t that a French name?)
More people were watching the trailers for upcoming ABC shows on the Jumbotron behind Cobb’s head than were listening to the candidate. ( I’ll admit, even I drifted; I’m sorry, but tell me you’re not excited about “Lost”!). I felt so bad for him that I remembered I was a reporter and started asking questions (or maybe I was just trying to impress the young female CNN intern–professionally, I assure you!).
I asked Cobb if he was worried that a vote for him is really a vote for George W. Bush. OK, that was a softball–and Cobb was ready. “What others call ‘spoiling the election’ we call ‘participating in democracy’,” he said. “We are going to exercise our democratic rights. I’m going to go across the country talking about instant run-off voting!” (Go get ’em, tiger!)
When pressed, Cobb admitted that different rules apply in the swing states. “John Kerry is a corporatist and a militarist,” Cobb said. “But if you live in a swing state, hold your nose and vote for Kerry.”
Finally, it was time to dive into the “crowd” and try to win some votes. Cobb made his pitch–end the war, take back the government from corporations, balance the budget, reform health care, protect the environment, etc.–and then waited for a reaction.
“How does that sound?” he asked one woman.
“Good,” she said, with all the enthusiasm of someone choosing between laundry detergents. She was so engaged, in fact, that when Cobb asked if she had any questions, she and the rest of her family walked away.
Finally, the beer bum came over to talk about decriminalizing drugs. He and Cobb actually discussed it for several valuable campaign minutes, with Cobb making his case for more drug treatment and better housing for addicts.
“How are you going to pay for it?” the bum asked. Cobb explained that ending the war on drugs would create untold savings. The bum was impressed. “Thanks for coming out,” Cobb said. (Coming out? It was really no bother; he lives under that awning.)
In the end, I felt bad for David Cobb. Take away that extreme Socialist crap and most Americans could find a lot of common ground with him. But because third party candidacies are considered such a joke, most of us would sooner vote for Oprah than for David Cobb.
Then again, Oprah would kick Osama’s ass! (You know she would).
title: “It S Not Easy Being Green” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-07” author: “Katie Brunette”
How do consumers know that something is really green and not just ‘greenwashed,’ as fake marketing tactics are known? There’s an eco-chic thing going on that’s really just more rampant consumption—SUV hybrids, green designer jeans. You cannot simply shop your way to a greener future. If something is labeled as “green” and comes in a wad of packaging, it’s not. The book talks about smart, smaller choices. Once people begin to make smaller choices, they begin to think about the bigger issues.
When people read that their choice of shaving cream is causing environmental degradation, won’t they just feel guilty? The goal isn’t to make people feel guilty. No one’s perfect. Even Al Gore lives in a large home.
And George Bush collects rainwater on the roof of his ranch house. He and Laura do well in this area.
What habits could the harried modern consumer change? The first is transportation. Take the bus when you can. Carpool. When you are shopping, try to do fewer trips. But don’t berate yourself when you can’t take mass transit. We’re not expecting people to live off the grid. The second is shopping. Buy local, organic produce if you can afford it. The third is voting. Choose candidates who [promote] responsible policies to counter global warming. And don’t leave the water?running when you shave.
If someone says “I’ve got five minutes today to green my life,” what should they do? How about turning off your computer when you leave it? Shower instead of bathe. Think of needs versus wants. You don’t need a second home, even if it is green-built. The energy that goes into a plasma TV is massive. And in the great debate over paper versus plastic, the answer is a cloth bag.
