Environmentally Friendly Markets Well After All
I remember, about ten years ago, broaching the subject of environmentally-friendly products to a marketing consultant advising Fortune 500 corporations on how to design new generations of products for people to buy. He scoffed. “People just don’t care about the environment. They might say that they do, but they won’t buy that stuff.”
Recent economic trends suggest that this consultant, and the corporations he advised, missed a lot of opportunity by their early dismissal of the motivational power of keeping the environment clean. This last year, the sales of environmentally-friendly household cleaners increased by more than 23 percent from sales in the previous year. That’s on top of the previous year’s increases.
Big corporations are now scrambling to try to get a piece of the environmentally-friendly market, years later than they should have been.
We voters, in our selection of a presidential candidate, are sadly like them. We should have gotten ourselves an environmentally-friendly candidate years ago, but we refused in 2000, and again in 2004. Let’s not make the same mistake again in 2008.
(Source: USA Today, November 26, 2007)
I was amazed yesterday at Linens ‘N Things to find sheets by Wamsutta that were 60% bamboo. They were marketed as “Zen” sheets, not as environmentally friendly ones, but it’s a step in the right direction.