When it comes to cheaply made, gauze-colored, overpriced furniture, Raymour and Flanigan has got the market cornered. Their musical ditty, too, is one for the ages, and was first made famous by none other than President Howard Taft: “I can’t get this f***ing jingle out of my head!” But now the ottoman oligarchy is trying a new selling tactic- I call it the “bouncing ball of flubber” greenwashing attempt. Check it out:
This is certainly the oddest greenwashing commercial I’ve hit upon yet. Specifically, I single out this text:
Cardboard becomes something like books or paper products. Plastic and styrofoam turns into things like toys and every day useful items. Now that’s truly beautiful.
Whoever wrote this dialogue is not really sure (a) what recycling is for, or (b) how exactly it works. Apparently, in the R & F recylcing plant: leftover boxes and plastic tarps have a parade, then start a conga line, and finish by dropping acid and following green balls of flubber into recycling machines. Instantly, teddy bears and books appear, whirling around in a reefer haze, making the world greener with every bouncy step. Ah, the magical world of recycling. I’d like to take a tour of this factory.
Tomorrow, April 14, is “Big Picture” day at Starbucks. Now, don’t get all excited- they’re not giving away free giant photographs of coffee beans and barista tools- I know, it’s very disappointing. But, according to the coffee cult’’s website, if you bring a reusable mug into any Starbucks tomorrow, they’ll fill it with coffee for free. Why? They want to encourage customers to think of the big picture by considering the life span of each thing they throw away. Starbucks’ goal? To encourage more people to begin using reusable coffee cups daily, resulting in more trees and less disposable cups in landfills. They’ve got an online pledge you can take, and the numbers fuel the site’s calculator which shows “how many trees” people are predicted to save by using their own cups.
Dutiful readers, well aware of my usual attacks when it comes to company “greening” efforts, may be suprised at my reaction to this campaign. I actually like this one! It’s rare for a company to discuss customer’s habits, and motivate for positive change. And this free coffee bit, followed by Starbucks’ unending promise of 10 cents off any drink when using a reusable cup, are pretty convincing perks. Bribery works, and I’m interested to see just how many people Starbucks can get to take one step forward in reducing their daily waste.
Starbucks, no doubt, benefits widely from this plan: they get a lot of positive PR, a flood of customers tomorrow, and reduced costs from not providing cups, sleeves, and lids to a large percentage of customers. Still, though, I think the net positive outweighs the gain by Starbucks big wigs. So dig out that coffee mug and get to drinking the pep juice- your environment needs you!
First of all, full disclaimer that “locowashing” is an awful portmanteau – almost (but not quite) as bad as “he-cession.”
This cracks me up though, it really does. Thanks to the apparent trendiness of bioregional eating, the ad wizards hailing from the four corners of corporate fantasyland have decided that it would be a tremendous idea to “go local” themselves. Unfortunately – there doesn’t appear to be a crystal-clear understanding of what exactly “local” entails…
A few examples, ranging from the mildly bile-inducing to the full-on, gut-bustingly, milk-snortingly hilarious:
The one that started the attention was most likely the Frito-Lay corporation, whose marketing campaign in early 2009 gently nudged attention from the quality of the product itself to the “local people and communities” who grow their potatoes. The logic is sound, I guess, in an infuriating know-it-all 6th-grader kind of way: “Potatoes have to be grown by somebody, don’t they? And those people are growing them somewhere, aren’t they? So the potatoes are local to the place where they’re grown. Right?” My favorite feature of this ad campaign? It would have to be the “Chip Tracker” gadget that let’s you pop in a zip code and learn exactly which ”local community” has painstakingly and lovingly grown your potato chips, hopefully taking long, picturesque siestas and relaxing with big pitchers of iced tea and 2.5 children per farmhouse. (For the record: mass produced chips are not small-batch delicacies. It’s a neat gimmick to give you the location of where potatoes are sourced, but dollars to donuts the Chip Tracker kicks out the closest farm to your zip code without telling you anything about how millions of bags of chips are actually shipped and stored around the country.)
This is a review week. First, hotels. Later, I hope to get a few episodes of The Goode Family under my belt (New! from ABC!). But today, it’s a review of a product that I have not, technically, tried: a cell phone.
Ok, I know it’s not really a review of the product… it’s more an analysis of what happens when corporations claim to be green. Some of them really are!
Is it Greenwashing or is it Legit?
We will rank products that are LtAG reviewed on a series of Al Gores (see the grid to the right for the scoring effect)
For example, the Proximity gets 5 Al Gores – tip top luxury, combined with as much green per square inch as you can imagine. The new Sunchips campaign from the good folks Frito Lay? It’s looking like it might get an Inhoff – the ranking reserved for pure Green-washing with no actual corporate change.
The subject of this week’s episode: The new Motorola MOTO W233 Renew.
This brand spankin new phone claims to be the first CarbonFree® (that’s right, that’s a restricted phrase now: a rating certification much like the Gores!) out there. Lets see what that means…
Motorola offsets the amount of energy used to make and distribute the phone by buying Carbon offsets.
The battery seems to be pretty good: nine hours of continuous use isn’t shabby.
Recyclable exterior.
They have a cool program where the phone’s documentation includes an addressed and stamped envelope to return the thing when it breaks: planned obsolescence is gravy when they are keeping the phones out of landfills. I wonder if there is any program for incentivizing the process — its always easier to just toss the thing in the trash.
I really like this trend of top-down greening, where someone takes the time to examine every aspect of the product: creation, marketing, use, and death. (more…)
As much as I want to write a told-you-so article filled with recriminations at GM for what seemed (to me) like an obvious SUV error, that’s being written all over the place by even snark-ier folk then I. No one wants to hear me crowing about that, anyway… the fall of an American Industry has, paradoxical, made me feel a tad patriotic in a protective mother-hen sort of way. (Not patriotic enough, however, that I can’t gloat a little ’bout the Death of the Hummer).
Meanwhile, I failed to post on Friday — and the LtAG brain trust didn’t pick up the slack. Our bad. It was a long weekend, filled with wedding things for me. But, while travel times made posting problematic, the results were glorious, and very interesting from an LtAG perspective.
I spent my weekend here: The Proximity Hotel, in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Proximity (so named, I think, for it’s strong locavore leanings in all things from restaurant food to wall-art) is the country’s first LEED Platinum certification luxury hotel. Possibly the world’s first, though since the world doesn’t use the LEED… that might be a moot point.
It means, basically, that every hoop that the LEED regulatory held up, Proximity jumped through. Out of 110 possible “points” for doing things green, Platinum rating means that they earned more then 80 of em, in categories including water quality, materials used, energy & atmosphere, and indoor environmental quality. And let me tell ya, the list of stuff is way more then just superficial “lets put out recycle bins” action, too: (more…)
After all that tom-foolery the other day ’bout Ethanol, Mark made a good point on the entire discussion: Show me the numbers!
Well, interestingly enough, Tuesday’s New York Times showed off some numbers — only I don’t think they were the the numbers Mark was looking for. No, these numbers where far more sinister. These are numbers about Ethanol and that fantastic enviro-buggaboo: Big Oil.
A charitable reading of that article: These two former arch enemies are starting to see eye to eye on how they can work together to solve the energy problems confronting this country. A less charitable reading: Oil Companies are co-opting the movement because they 1) realize they need to green up some, 2) see a potential for profit, and 3) see that bio-fuels don’t require them to dramatically shift anything: cars can still run, gas can still be pumped, and no one has to really re-invest or rethink how they live.
Meanwhile, they are bringing there massive and terrifying lobby power to bear on an issue where the statistics can make them seem like they are turning over a new leaf.
Number Times
Ok, enough. Mark, here are some of them numbers.
36 billion — the number of gallons of Biofuels that Congress mandated to be produced by 2022. That’s three times the current amount, and essentially guarantees that Ethanol in some format will be a cash crop — even if it’s never as energy efficient as it needs to be.
$1.5 billion — the amount that BP has invested in Biofuel research over the last 2 years.
3 billion — the approximate number of bushels of corn that went into Ethanol production in 2007 .
330,000 — estimated number of barrels of Petroleum, per day, replaced by Ethanol in 2008.
Eat locally, think globally. “Tacos at Midnight”-flavored Doritos. These two phrases are rarely seen in conjunction with each other. Until now. Frito-Lay (owned by PepsiCo.) has decided to fight back against the bad name that local food movements have given to big brands, by arguing that they too are a small-town brand, made and manufactured locally. Well color me orange with Cheeto dust.
According to a Times article published on Tuesday, “Frito-Lay is one of several big companies that, along with some large-scale farming concerns, are embracing a broad interpretation of what eating locally means. This mission creep has the original locavores choking on their yerba mate. But food executives who measure marketing budgets in the millions say they are mining the concept because consumers care more than ever about where their food comes from.” The greasy chip behemoth will begin a nation-wide commercial campaign next week to show just how fresh and locally-produced their products are. Well, I can’t say that I’m surprised. After GE arguing that they are the strongest researchers of green energy alternatives ( what they deem ecomagination), and BP changing their acronym to mean “Beyond Petroleum,” rather than “British Petroleum,” I’m no longer that taken aback when a large company argues that it’s everything it’s not.
I salute you, greenwashers, for being GIANT LIARS OUT THERE TO TRICK US ALL. Godspeed.
This is what happens, Larry. This is what happens when no one knows what a word means!
I don’t want to throw this table at the top of this post, but there is a big list of the words that can be defined under the rubric of “green”. A big list. This means, of course, that when people use that word, they are often speaking in cross purposes, in riddles, and in secondary meanings.
Food Yields are Dropping.
The Punjab, India
India is in trouble right now. Large sections of the Bread Basket of Asia are experiencing lower and lower farming yields as they pesticide their soil to the point of no return. This is the sort of bad news (though I think that it’s something environmentalists have seen coming) which Monsanto and like companies were certainly ignoring for long stretches. (Much like SOMEone and his post on Monsanto!) A future without a dramatic change in farming methods and an improvement in land stewardship is one likely to look a lot like the American Dust Bowl in the ’30s, and the Joads know how that worked out. It goes with out saying that India’s food sources are not going to be able to hold up under all of the top soil blowing away.
A depressing and potentially horrific story in it’s own right, it also highlights for me how much Green-washing and Green Language needs a new set of words. You know, copyrighted words. That no one else can use. ‘Cause that’s how language works.
The “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s meant that if farmers embraced chemicals and high-yield seeds, their fields would turn lush green with crops. (An official at the U.S. State Department, William Gaud, apparently coined the term in 1968.)
During the Cold War, the term also implied that if countries like India could stamp out hunger, the population would be less likely to foment a violent revolution and go communist. (more…)
Another tidbit for today, culled from the extensive and scientifically-rigorous trolling we do of the internet for relevant news items: this highly-dugg humor article by cracked.com on 5 Ways People are Trying to Save the World (That Don’t Work). Most of the points made are pretty good, and in true cracked.com fashion, are successfully humorous because they let the air out of the tires of things we all love and take for granted. Kind of like a hip version of mythbusters that doesn’t involve a dude who looks like a persian cat. Here are the five green-crazed things that, according to Cracked, don’t work:
1) Buying carbon offsets (they compare it to buying your girlfriend a bracelet after a night in the Champagne Room)
2) Using antibacterial soap (Darwin sez…weeding out the weak bacteria and allowing the strong to flourish and pass on their resistances = major pwnage)
3) Recycling (the numbers show we aren’t actually going to suffocate ourselves in landfills or turn America into a WALL-E landscape as long as we keep making landfills deeper. Questionable, but I see where they’re going with that. A better point – often the energy expenditure and resource use of recycling far outstrips that of producing new materials…)
4) Rejecting vaccinations (seriously, why do people do this? This is kind of a straw man entry, in my opinion – no one seriously considers the conspiracy theories about vaccinations to be a legitimate environmentalist crusade.)
and 5) Buying organically grown food (because organic food isn’t healthier than non-organic food, decreases yield and therefore increases the hunger crisis, and uses more resources like water, fuel, and manure)
If you’ve gone on just about any blog that has to do with anything green in the past couple of days, you’ve probably seen an ad that looks like this: We don’t have ads on LtAG, so we are forced to import the times when capitalism makes us excited. Yes, in this case, we are pretty jazzed by the high profile company not just introducing a green line of computers, but overhauling two of their most popular products to be green. This is not a fringe type thing that only green conscious consumers will get behind (though if I know anything about the iMarket, most mac users are going to find this pretty much in their wheelhouse), it’s a public decision to change the way their main market is being made. And it’s not just green washing:
Each new MacBook is designed with the following features to reduce its environmental footprint:
Arsenic-free glass
Mercury-free LED-backlit display
BFR-free internal components
PVC-free internal cables
Highly recyclable aluminum and glass enclosure
Up to 41 percent smaller packaging
Meets ENERGY STAR requirements
EPEAT Gold rating
Ahh. but here’s the rub. As an “environmentalist”, the well acknowledged best thing that you can do for the world is to consume less, especially when it comes to electronics. As I type away on this current MacBook Pro, already nearing complete obsolescence in less then a year, I am reminded of all the nasty things lurking inside this machine ready to leach out and destroy some one’s drinking supply. As a result, I have run smack dab into the desire to be bleeding edge with my new mac adoption system. I really really want that machine, but I think I’ll have to wait while this one dies a natural death. Please don’t be offended, dear computer. I love you. PleaSe doN’t be mappdee . HeyA! Give m33 bachet keybrrrrrd conTro%%(( AFJ!!
Tomorrow, April 14, is “Big Picture” day at Starbucks. Now, don’t get all excited- they’re not giving away free giant photographs of coffee beans and barista tools- I know, it’s very disappointing. But, according to the coffee cult’’s 
We will rank products that are LtAG reviewed on a series of Al Gores (see the grid to the right for the scoring effect)
Another tidbit for today, culled from the extensive and scientifically-rigorous trolling we do of the internet for relevant news items: this highly-dugg humor article by cracked.com on 
We don’t have ads on LtAG, so we are forced to import the times when capitalism makes us excited. Yes, in this case, we are pretty jazzed by the high profile company not just introducing a green line of computers, but 
