It’s Not Easy Shopping Green
We here at Boston Daily have had our faith in the capitalist system tested today. It seems that companies may be exaggerating the benefits of their green products. For profit!
Oh, the humanity.
It’s like finding out there isn’t an Easter Bunny all over again.
Few products have raised more objections than Nestlé’s new single-use “eco-shape” water bottle. The bottle, which uses 30 percent less plastic than similar products, is touted by Nestlé-owned Poland Spring as “doing our part.”
But eco-bloggers say there is no need for bottles at all.
But. . . its name has “eco” in it. That must mean it’s good for the planet!
At least the piny-smelling Simple Green will help keep the threatened polar bears afloat in the Arctic.
[O]ne of Simple Green’s key ingredients, butyl cellosolve, is the same toxic solvent found in some traditional all-purpose cleaners. The label even cautions users not to “dispose of . . . near storm drains, oceans, lakes or streams.”
The world has gone mad. Someone explain this to us.
The marketing of faux green products is now so widespread that there is a term for the practice - “greenwashing.”
Marketers, some environmentalists and marketing specialists say, are merely tapping into people’s desire to feel like they’re saving the earth - but not sacrificing their lifestyle.
We’re doing what Al Gore told us to do. If we should be doing something else, maybe he needs to make An Inconvenient Truth 2.
God. Saving the planet is so hard.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:48 am
Umm…I’m all for knocking down the greenwashing and saving the polar bears, but what does NOT disposing a product into open waterways have to do with “saving the polar bears”? The polar bears aren’t dying from polluted water (though that is always going to be a global problem). They are dying from reduced ice floats thanks to AGW.
I’d love to hear how you reached the conclusion that those two are related. And if you do have a good reason, maybe you should fully explain that to we the readers.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Response to your strange comment:
“At least the piny-smelling Simple Green will help keep the threatened polar bears afloat in the Arctic.
[O]ne of Simple Green’s key ingredients, butyl cellosolve, is the same toxic solvent found in some traditional all-purpose cleaners. The label even cautions users not to “dispose of . . . near storm drains, oceans, lakes or streams.”
The world has gone mad. Someone explain this to us.”
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Here’s the simple explanation of the statement on our label:
We are only trying to be good corporate citizens by reminding people that even though they are cleaning with a biodegradable and non-toxic product,the contaminants that can become mixed with the cleaner during the cleaning process may not be non-toxic or biodegradable - so don’t flush the stuff to storm drains or open waterways. I don’t know what’s so hard to grasp about that. Beth Daley of the Globe has been given this explanation before and acted as though she understood it. She has also received our full battery of independent laboratory data that unequivocally shows that the product meets all scientific and governmental definitions of “non-toxic” and “biodegradable”, yet she apparently refuses to read it. Just like salt (Na / Cl), you cannot break a mixture down into its individual components and assign the qualities of one ingredient to the entire mixture. If that were the case, you’d never eat or drink most of the items that you purposefully ingest that contain preservatives.
At our company, we like to think that consumers are smarter than the media - so we post our MSDS on the Internet, we do list that ingredient on our label under its chemical family name, and we don’t shy away from chemical-phobia.