Thoughts on how being "green" is now a marketing tool.
Who isn't green these days? It seems like every company advertising anywhere is now green, eco-friendly and fighting hard to stop global warming ... but is it true? Has the global corporate world suddenly risen up as one and gotten environmental religion?
The short answer is, probably no. Oil companies are still drilling for oil and refining and selling fossil fuels. Pesticide makers are still marketing poisons designed to kill pests and weeds. Giant retailers are still shipping products thousands of miles and operating brightly lit, climate-controlled, energy-guzzling mega-stores.
Some companies -- maybe even most, to some degree -- are making little green improvements here and there: upgrading their fleets with vehicles that get 5 or 10 miles more to the gallon, maybe, or adding skylights to their new buildings to reduce artificial lighting needs a bit. It's a start, but many have a long way to go before you could honestly call them green. It's just that green is in, and marketers have figured that out; it's a way to bring in green of a different kind.
So don't believe the hype. Before you make a buying decision based on a "we're-now-green" ad campaign, do some homework first to find out if it's really true. There might be a greener business you could support instead that simply isn't as spending as much on green marketing.
