How green is your product?

Suddenly everyone claims to have a green product. It saves energy or uses fewer trees or produces less greenhouse gases or does or doesn’t do something else that someone claims is important for the environment. Or the seller simply calls it green without ever giving a reason why.

I see products that have been around for fifty years that have undergone no special change to become more environmentally-friendly and the producers are now labeling them green. For some I can see that there is a case to be made that it somehow helps save the environment. But for others I can’t see anything environmentally-friendly about the product except maybe that the label on it that says green is made of recycled paper. The practice of taking a product that really has no significant environmental benefits and calling it green to increase sales even has a name now. It’s called greenwashing. Just the fact that someone took the trouble to coin a term for it tips us off that it’s a pretty common practice.

But what qualifies a product as green? I talked with supply houses that were founded to sell green building products. I asked them what their customers were looking for. This sounded like as good a measure as any of what is truly green. If the buyer—the person willing to shell out his own hard-earned dollars for a green product—says what he’s looking for is a product with characteristic X, who am I to argue? It sure beats asking the product manufacturers. According to manufacturers, my product is green (and by implication the competition’s is not). What I heard shocked me.

The number one attribute that buyers shopping at green building supply companies were looking for was health benefits. They wanted products with no toxins, emissions, or offgassing. Or they wanted products that clean up the indoor air somehow—reduce allergens, pollutants, etc.

The second most-commonly sought product attribute was energy efficiency. People were looking for products that conserve energy, reduce energy consumption, or generate energy.

The third most-commonly sought product attribute was low impact on the greater environment. That means things that are made without scarce resources, without releasing greenhouses gasses, without disturbing the natural environment, and so on.

I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty disappointing that the people who are supposedly championing environmentally-friendly products actually prioritize the greater environment third. It’s not that their personal health and energy cost savings are not important. It’s that I thought the benefit of the globe and the welfare of the populace as a whole was supposed to be the point of the green movement. Not my own personal interests. Yet this is what the distributors of green building products—the ones who set out to sell products that are “good for the environment”—are telling me that their customers look for.

Maybe I’m a cynic, but now that I’ve heard these things I can’t help but question what’s behind the purchase of every ostensibly green product out there. When people buy natural clay-based plaster is it because they think mining gypsum for plaster causes environmental damage, or is it because of the air quality and health benefits claimed by the producers of the clay plaster? When they buy bamboo flooring, is it because they think bamboo is a more renewable resource than hardwoods, or because bamboo flooring has less to offgas? Heaven knows that homebuyers constantly ask how much concrete homes will save them off their energy bill (personal interest), not what the net global energy reduction of the product will be (environmental interest).

But I suppose that mine is not to reason why. We see what the consumer wants and try to provide it. So now we see a little better and we try to provide it a little better. It’s just a tad disappointing . . .