The Eco Craze

Organics. Chemical Free. Bio based products. Lately, it’s all about saving the world. We need to go green, to recycle, to make our carbon footprint smaller. And now- lucky us, it’s become the latest trend—you can buy eco-friendly almost anything. Clothes? Yep. Toys? You got it. Even water bottles have gone “green” with their new design. But do those things actually help the environment? Are we supporting our Earth by paying triple for “eco-products”? Or are we just letting ourselves get swept up by the label, not even thinking about how exactly we are saving the earth?

We’ve all fallen for the trick. We want to help save our world, but following all these energy and resource saving regulations is difficult and requires tons of sacrifices especially with the extravagant life style that we’ve all grown up with. Then we see a canvas bag being sold at the grocery store costing $15, advertising that 25% percent of its profits go to an eco-friendly organization. Who cares if we use it to pile in fruits and vegetables that have been doused in pesticides? Who cares that the dye in the bag is chock full of chemicals? All that matters is $3.75 of our money has gone to charity, and hey, we didn’t use a plastic bag!

Companies everywhere have started to take advantage of our desire to help the world and our inability to find a palatable way to achieve it. It’s a perfect business opportunity for them; announce “eco-friendliness” on a product and people clamor to buy it, not realizing they’re being charged triple the price they should have been. It’s okay to pay $200 for jeans if they say that they’re made from organic cotton. The company just “forgot” to mention the pollution and waste left from the factory that makes the jeans. And that every time you wash them with regular detergent you make more pollution than the non-organic cotton did that was used for “non-eco” jeans.

A generic logo for a "green" business via Digital Marketing Zen

This is no mistake. There’s a reason why companies are suddenly advocating “being green” and why it’s become the latest trend. It isn’t because they actually care about helping the Earth; they make that pretty clear when they sell furs, deplete the rainforest, liberally spray pesticides, and build their factories in countries where there are no pollution regulations. It’s the money. They’re making a fortune from our support of their eco-friendliness, taking advantage of our emotional shallowness.

It turns out that there are ways of keeping yourself green that actually do decrease your carbon footprint and they happen to cost a fraction of what “green” products do!  Instead of buying packs of the new “half the plastic eco” water bottles, drinking them, and then throwing them back out in the trash, just buy a long lasting water bottle and reuse it. Don’t buy hundreds of dollars worth of  ”natural” clothes, go to a thrift store and buy clothes that are already made. Go beyond buying a “save our earth” bumper sticker and putting it on your SUV; ride your bike instead.

Don’t be fooled by the eco-friendly hype. We should be supporting the Earth, not the trendy new green movement.

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