How Green is Green?

The enviro-buzz started a few years back when Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio were spotted driving Prius hybrids rather than Escalades or Ferraris. Then, when Al Gore’s film/PowerPoint extravaganza An Inconvenient Truth captured the Oscar® for Best Documentary this past March, green hipness went truly mainstream.

Now saving the planet is big business. We recently heard from an executive at Philips Lighting that the company was working its way out of the incandescent light bulb business. Wal-Mart is also basking in the fluorescent glow hoping to sell 100 million of the energy saving bulbs. Home Depot is creating an eco-friendly endorsement label for a growing number of its products. I even saw an eco-themed window display at luxury retailer Hermes when walking through Knightsbridge this week. For those of us who have been environmentalists long enough to remember the first Earth Day, it seemed we might actually have reached a tipping point. Green is turning to gold and real change is in the air.

That, of course, attracts people looking more to cash in on the trend than actually make a difference. I recently read about new green media enterprises hoping to capitalize on resurgent environmentalism. Included in this write up was Sprig, a Web site for women who want to make their lives more Earth-friendly. But not that Earth-friendly.

“We’re targeting this to the 95 percent of people who want to be 5 percent green,” said Jeanie Pyun, Sprig’s editor in chief in a New York Times article. “Not the 5 percent of people who want to be 95 percent green.” Well, at least she’s honest about her cynicism.

Five percent green. Does one need a whole Web site for that? How else would I find out about the $160 Chanel eye cream with a key ingredient that’s “organic and sustainably harvested on Madagascar, where Chanel provides the local employees with education and health care.” It’s good to know we can look great while shopping our way to a sustainable future. (And I do applaud sustainable harvesting and healthcare for the locals.)

As a recovering marketer, I can see the temptation to get on the bandwagon quickly. And perhaps the demand is for eco-super light. But I also have seen the greater insistence on authenticity from consumers. I don’t think that the majority is looking the equivalent of the fat-free food craze a couple of year’s back when consumers gorged on jillions of calories of low-fat and fat-free food – only to be surprised when they gained weight.

Maybe it is just unfounded optimism but I get the feeling that most people want to be more than five percent green.