As more and more businesses seek to capture the interest of the ‘green’ consumer a thick fog is moving in. This fog risks to cloud the road ahead and we need some serious head lights to catch a few proverbial deers prancing around. A few hilarious deers are prancing around in polka dot tights getting ready for Christmas and labelling all sorts of things eco, green , natural, and good for the earth!
The runner up on fooling the market for green was a line of cutlery recently launched in the USA by a Canadian company and distributed in Canada for the last eight months labelled ‘compostable’. We found the cutlery ourselves while on a sales call. We sent the cutlery for testing and voila: plastic. Well to be fair it did have a touch of conrstanrch for good measure but it definetely was not compostable.
The winner though was a ‘green’ plastic bag. Yes the bag was green in colour and it was plastic. It was confirmed it was not a joke, just manufacturers think we are that stupid.
Honourable mention was a large grocery store that claims to recycle its plastic bags and turn them into park benches.
I love this question. Many people ask this one- expecting to stump me. Our world craves a black and white answer, something clear and defined to help us point out what is right and what is wrong on this planet. We crave this because our head hurts when we need to actually think things through …
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There is nothing green in a sales pitch “this product will biodegrade in a landfill’. A manufacturer or a sales person feeding you that pitch is either desperate for a sale or does not know very much about the environment and landfills. To put it simply landfills are big toxic holes in the earth which …
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In theory everything is recyclable. I could recycle a building, an airplane, a DVD, a camera…or even my tooth brush. For something recyclable to actually be recycled someone needs to take that something and want to turn it into something new. That is exactly where the problem lies with the recycling concept. In 1988-89 I …
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It would be so simple if we could just trust businesses like we trust our friends and family. If a business says it has a green product, or is a green company, or donates to charities, it would be so much easier if we could just believe them. And we can…if they have verifiable and …
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You will hear more and more companies talking about carbon offsets and being carbon neutral. Many airlines now offer their customers the option to ‘offset’ the carbon footprint of their travel. Soon you will see carbon neutral ketchup and pineapples in grocery stores. What do these claims really mean? To start off it is important …
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In my opinion not very green. The Sysco Canada environmental brochure sysco-environmental-brochure-apr7082 is filled with false marketing and false-hoods. First up: Sysco’s claim that their paper cup and paper food containers are an ‘eco-friendly’ alternative to Styrofoam. The wax that covers the paper is made from petroleum derivatives. This wax is intended to plasticize the …
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The Copenhagen Climate Change conference threatens to be derailed. It was a mistake to attempt to build international support for taking better care of our planet by using data. Data can always be manipulated and facts are only facts until they are proven to be wrong. You can bet someone somewhere will try to prove …
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When it comes to product sourcing to make sure Canada is as green as possible for 2010 Olympics the world is watching us. I found out just how closely a few months ago. It seems like ages ago that we did a sales call (St-FXU Sodexo- June 2009) and blogged about losing sales to a …
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For a chunk of my life I was one of those complainers pointing the finger at businesses calling them unethical, profit maximizers and lamented on how they caused so many problems for society and the world. I kicked back in my smugness never really appreciating that the regular pay cheque I received (either as a …
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