Are Some Corporate Definitions of “Green” Just Another Marketing Ploy?

As buying “green” products becomes more and more trendy, corporations are beginning to see it as one more opportunity to improve the market share of their products. In some cases, this kind of change in the manufacture and use of a product may be a good improvement, but unless the consumer is completely informed about where the product is made, where the raw materials come from and all the steps that are involved in the manufacture of a product, “green” is just another label slapped on in order to sell more stuff.

Take hard drives as an example. Many hard drive manufactures are coming up with what they call “green” drives. They are marketing them in this way in order to satisfy a demand put on by the portion of consumers that specifically compare their purchases this way. How much of the hard drive is actually green, if you look at what it takes to manufacture one?

These are the steps involved in the production of an average hard drive. Although the process listed here may be typical, it is not universal. I’m generalizing in order to make a point.

1. Design and engineering of the hard drive is done in a building that still runs on conventional energy sources, constructed from conventional materials.

2. The corporate paradigm is still “growth and progress” and profits at the expense of raw materials costs and quality. Employee satisfaction and sustainability are not nearly as important as reporting profitable quarters, keeping the stock prices high, and increasing market share.

3. The drive is manufactured overseas in Asia to save money in labor and operating costs. The raw materials (NONE of which are recycled or reclaimed) for the drives are shipped in from all over the world, depending on where the cost of the materials is lowest. Thus, it takes a lot of energy to ship in raw materials.

4. Part of the production of the drive itself requires some of the metal parts to be baked at 190° C for 5 hours to ensure that all particulates and contaminates are eliminated, thereby sterilizing the part. This improves reliability, but it takes a lot of energy to get that result. Also, the energy to bake those parts comes mostly from Asian coal-fired power plants.

5. The finished product is shipped out of Asia and into the U.S. Again, the carbon cost of shipping the hard drive is higher than if the drives were made in the U.S. or closer to where the majority of the consumers will actually use the drives.

Now, here’s where the “green” definition comes in for that drive.

It is designed in a way that the disc spins slightly slower than average. Therefore, it uses less electricity to run than a non-green hard drive. If a green hard drive saves you 5 watts of electricity, and it runs continuously for five years, it would save roughly 200 kilowatt hours of electricity over its lifetime, or the equivalent of running a television/dvd player system for 55 days. This is the worse case scenario, if you never turned off your computer in the five years you owned it.

You can see for yourself that the “green” aspect of this product represents maybe what? 1% of the total carbon footprint of this product, best case scenario. It doesn’t take into account the embodied energy it took to put that drive together—namely, the amount of energy it took to mine the metals and petroleum products, ship them, manufacture them and then produce a design from which they would be then constructed.

It’s important that we place a higher standard for the term “green” and we hold companies accountable to showing how they reduced shipping distances, reused raw materials, increased sustainability in their manufacturing facilities, and changed their overall paradigm to include sustainability into the equation.

Whenever we see a “greener” version of a product we have to realize that no one is addressing the embodied energy it took to produce that product. It’s important to consider the whole picture. Maybe one day there will be labeling requirements for green products in the same vein that we have labeling for nutrition and ingredient content.

Not only that, but the carbon “cost” of products could be included in the price, thus turning the cost of goods upside down – the more embodied energy it takes to make something (especially if it’s made in China), the more expensive it would be. Local, sustainably produced products would actually (gasp!) be the cheapest products on the market.

That would be a step in the right direction.