Green Options

Here’s the problem: 80,000 tons of flexible plastic packaging are manufactured each year in Indonesia and for every one ton of manufacturing, there’s thirty tons of waste. The average timespan of a single-use drink container packaged in flexible plastic is only 4 seconds. Because there are no safe disposal methods for flexible plastic, it may accumulate and then sit in a landfill forever. And because there are no traditional recycling techniques for this type of plastic it has little resale market value. Rather than allow this flexible plastic to become potential toxic waste by clogging landfills and waterways, The XSProject Foundation acquires the plastic from trash pickers before it piles up in toxic landfills.

Three days ago, I blogged about the EPA’s Green Power Partners site, which lists the top green power users in the country. That post got more traffic in a day than my posts normally get in a month. That was very exciting for me. People clearly care about this issue. At least for me, when all things are equal a company’s commitment to environmental sustainability can make the difference between one product choice and another. I hope it does for others, too.

Let me build on that by saying that there is even more good news than this. Did you notice that the Green Power Partners site also has Top 20 lists by category? These include college & university, local government, retail, on-site, and printers.

What’s interesting here is printers. This is a highly unglamorous category. Why would the EPA care about commercial printing and packaging companies? For the same reasons that anyone interested in environmental sustainability should care about them.

1. Printing is the third largest manufacturing industry in the country

2. Printing is a very aggressive with environmental sustainability, including its use of green power.

Put these together and you have the third largest manufacturing industry making a major move to sustainability. When not just individual companies but an entire industry embraces green technologies and processes, it makes a real difference. That’s exciting!

Yet, where’s all the buzz? E-media! With its 24-hour-a day, 7-days-a-week power usage, its ubiquitous energy-using devices from desktop computers to laptops to servers to cellphones, PDAs, and every other mobile device that now blanket the planet and drain the power grid. Meanwhile, because printing uses — dare I say the word — paper, it’s the bad guy?

This column highlights the top economic stories of the week.

One way in which today’s corporation is becoming enlightened to the fact that green manufacturing CAN equal more profitable manufacturing is through a new concept called “lean manufacturing“.   In the 1980’s, JIT, or just-in-time techniques became all the rage in management circles as they shaved costs from production by eliminating the need for high levels of inventories by focusing [...]

An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints, highlights the next trend in green marketing, calculating and promoting the supply chain carbon footprint.

Never mind that the average consumer isn’t actually aware or at least has a pretty fuzzy grasp of what exactly a carbon footprint is, manufacturers are busily calculating away. And, they are finding some fairly interesting facts.

Leather, milk and meat from cows pack a pretty big carbon footprint: The average dairy cow produces, every year, an amount of greenhouse gas equivalent to four tons of carbon dioxide, according to U.S. government figures. Most of that comes not from carbon dioxide, in fact, but from a more-potent greenhouse gas: methane.

The recipe for a low-carbon load of laundry: Use liquid detergent instead of powder.

… a six-pack’s carbon footprint was about seven pounds. The real surprise was where the bulk of that number came from: the refrigeration of the beer at stores.

I actually found some of these things pretty interesting too, but as a marketer, I have different questions. I’m wondering if this will be the next wave in green marketing. I’m wondering if we will really be able to educate consumers that much about the manufacturing process. I’m wondering if they will care.

At this point my gut feel is that this WILL become a trend. Consumers will react to carbon footprint information. Leather will be out. Mothers will switch to soy and rice milk (even more than they currently are). Powder detergent will become passé.