By Tracy Sorenson
Walk into any supermarket, turn the pages of any glossy magazine, and you'll find bountiful evidence of the corporate world's sudden conversion to the environmental cause. Petrochemical companies, logging companies, transnational car manufacturing firms, are all treading the earth lightly — or so they claim. Consumer items from tinned tuna to laundry detergent to toilet paper now sport an array of green ticks, spots, smiling trees and leaping dolphins.
There are still a few corporate executives and right-wing think-tank types who publicly insist that the environmental crisis doesn't exist or doesn't matter. But only a few.
Large corporations are hiring environment officers or engaging the services of environmental consultants. A survey by Coopers and Lybrand in May found that 36% of 352 companies responding to a questionnaire had formal environmental policies.
Business magazines describe executives switching to drinking their coffee out of china mugs and taking the stairs rather than the lift. Reports to shareholders are sometimes sent out on recycled paper.
Important sections of the corporate world have embraced the advice dished out at a Sydney breakfast seminar in July 1989: "Green your product or perish in the marketplace".
Once it caught on, the greening process emerged as a major business opportunity in itself.
The June 16 Australian Business commented that clean-up technologies "have now become the boom industry of the world, with a market currently at $500 billion (OECD figures) and predicted to be worth more than $1000 billion by 2000".
The magazine quotes an estimate from the Centre for Waste Management and Pollution Control at the University of New South Wales which puts the Australian market for the mining waste management sector at $5 billion a year, solid waste management at $485 million a year, hazardous waste at $123 million, gaseous waste $21 million and waste water treatment $1.2 billion.
Environmental consultancies are mushrooming: there are currently hundreds of firms specialising in environmental advice for businesses in Australia. "It's one of the few remaining growth areas around", environmental consultant Roger Pugh told Green Left Weekly.
Pugh, director of the Sydney-based firm Environmental Resources, argues that, while corporate greening is in early days yet, with companies making small adjustments like improving the information on product labels or cutting down on waste, change will become more "fundamental" over the next five or 10 years.
As an example of a "step in the right direction", Pugh points to Volvo's new scheme for shipping cars from Sweden to Australia: the pine boxes are now collapsible and sent home for reuse, rather than being destroyed after a single use.
Over the past three years or so, corporate Australia has thrown an enormous amount of money at the green problem, and it's likely to throw a lot more.
Some of this money translates into tangible improvement (clean-up operations) or potential damage not done (that many less Scandinavian pine trees cut down). Some companies have been delighted to find a modest initial outlay on environmental consultants has returned big savings by cutting out excessive waste.
On the supermarket shelves, consumers can now choose unbleached toilet paper and pump-action containers for spray starch; glass bottles for milk have made a trial comeback in some centres, and so on.
But a lot of the money has produced nothing more than green-tinged hype. Green claims have been made which are either misleading, or as substantial as thin air.
The September 1990 Choice magazine pointed out, for example, that the "CFC free" claim on a range of Puren products — dishwasher powder, dishwashing liquid and surface cleaners — was absurd: none of these products have traditionally contained CFCs. Down To Earth's "no phosphates" claim on its dishwashing liquid was similarly criticised.
Products bearing the legend "environmentally friendly" or "safe" were ticked off for being excessive: "All manufactured products will have an effect on the environment", noted the magazine. "Any foreign substance added to the environment disturbs its purity and so, by definition, pollutes it."
Then there are advertisements like the double-page spread in the October 16, 1990, Bulletin, which features the familiar "long view" of the planet from outer space. The text:
"Over the past few years it's become fashionable to be green. But at Honda, fashion has nothing to do with it.
"Since day one, Honda have been working extensively to develop products that are not only energy efficient, practical and easy to use but also kind to our fragile environment."
The claim that Honda has been green "since day one" (presumably day one of the Honda Corporation, not of the earth or the universe) is supported by reference, in the following paragraphs, to a fuel efficient engine developed in 1972.
But what car company has not at some point claimed fuel efficiency for its engines? Honda's striving to do something most car companies have done for decades is here presented as a green striving. A matter of gazing at the past through green lenses, perhaps?
Even if Honda executives and engineers had been committed environmentalists since the early 1970s, how meaningful is it to say that fossil fuel-burning, greenhouse gas-emitting cars are, or could be, "kind to our fragile environment"?
The ad continues: "And with the introduction of CFC recovery and recycling technology for automotive air conditioning systems, Honda are at the forefront of the movement to protect the ozone layer." Wouldn't it be a bit more at the "forefront" if it did away with CFC-based air conditioning all together?
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on September 5 considered some of the hype in car industry ads. In it, Brian Ford argued that "the public are victims of a sustained confidence trick".
Catalytic converters, lead-free petrol and fuel cells do not, he said, lessen greenhouse emissions.
Lead-free petrol doesn't reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide pollution. "The lead-free tuning results in a slight loss of engine efficiency. Cars achieve reduced mileage with this fuel, and so the volume of petrol burned — and with it the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere — increases after the change to lead-free fuel."
And how meaningful for an Australian audience is another ad in the Bulletin, this time from British Petroleum, in the September 10, 1991, issue? Again, a double-page spread and the long view of the planet; this time the earth is shaped to look like a glowing light globe. "How much longer can the world afford to be power mad?" runs the text, which adds that in the UK, "BP Energy is already converting industry to the major benefits of Combined Heat and Power".
A one sentence explanation: "It's a system which harnesses the
heat that industry traditionally allows to escape, providing a valuable source of heating and useable steam for the very site burning the fuel in the first place."
Sounds interesting. But when I rang BP Australia's public relations department in Melbourne for more information, they had never heard of it.
Clearly, the purpose of the advertisement appearing in an Australian magazine is simply the generation of positive feeling towards BP. It could be argued that it is no more or less socially useful than a beach scene Coke ad, or, for that matter, any ad.
Again, for an international company based on the extraction and refining of the fossil fuel which drives cars and trucks (and the stuff over which the Gulf War was fought) to associate itself with the fragile-planet-hanging-in-the-universe image is no small thing; the very least one would expect is that the company's local, wholly owned subsidiary would be more familiar with claims being made in the local press.
But the issue is deeper than simply misleading or dubious advertising. If everything is green, then everything's fine the way it is (with a few minor adjustments). An exasperated Greenpeace activist satirised the US situation in the group's May/June magazine: "Green chlorofluorocarbons. Green nuclear power plants. Green Agent Orange. Oil tankers, toxics incinerators, dolphin steaks — you name it, the PR flacks of America are ready to reassure you that it's green, clean, and using it is one more simple thing you can do to save the Earth."
Everything is clearly not fine the way it is. The greenest car is the one that doesn't exist. The greenest packaging doesn't exist, either. Green versions of the things we've already got are not, in most cases, going to move us towards the more fundamental solutions necessary to stop global warming and stop surrounding ourselves with overflowing land fills.
But that's all that's on offer from the newly enlightened corporations.
Significant changes are made only when public pressure starts to put the squeeze on profits. The US Du Pont company, for example, sat on technology that could produce alternatives to CFCs for at least three or four years, insisting that change would be expensive and unnecessary. During that time, it built new CFC plants in the Third World using the old technology.
Once public pressure and various government regulations demanded the change, Du Pont was in an excellent position to corner the market in the new technology.
In Australia, the chemicals company ICI is often mentioned in business journals as one which has benefited from seeing the green light early. ICI will spend $50 million on environmental programs in 1991. The company's internal environmental auditing team now hawks itself around to other companies.
In fact, ICI's conversion to the cause came only after years of attention from environmentalists over a series of pollution incidents, including a spill of mercury into the Sydney sewage system from its Botany operations in July last year. The 15 June SMH noted that Sydney Water Board chair David Harley had warned the company to clean up its plant or face being cut off from the sewage system, a move which would have closed down the plant.
But while big companies tend to be reactive on significant issues, they show every sign of being "pro-active" in thinking up ways to convert the widespread concern about the destruction of the ecosystem into new products. More things to buy and sell. More television ads. More PR. More little packets.
The latest Big Thing is called the Fottle, "Australia's very first foldable bottle". Fottles, which take up less than 20% of their former volume when folded, and use 60% less plastic than ordinary plastic bottles, are held to "make recycling easier" and take up less space at rubbish tips.
The publicity quotes Mark Vaughan, business development manager, SC Johnson & Son: "It provides the environmentally concerned consumer with the opportunity to contribute to a cleaner world."
Rena Penna, assistant manager of the Cleanhouse Effect shops in the Sydney suburbs of Dee Why and Newtown, which stock products which can be refilled indefinitely using the same container, told Green Left that the Fottle was a good idea in that it would help reduce the total amount of solid waste.
"But basically it's still plastic. It's still going to be there in thousands of years." Plastic, she said, was not a problem in and of itself: its durability meant it could be used "thousands and thousands of times". It was a problem if it was designed to be used once and thrown away.
Then there was the question of what was inside the Fottles: the product is starting its life as the refill pack for Charge Pre-Wash, Soft Wash and Toilet Duck. Does the world — or more specifically, the sea off Bondi Beach — need Toilet Duck?
Friends of the Earth waste minimisation campaigner Peter Hopper told Green Left that the crucial point was to move beyond "short-term gimmicky ideas.
"We have to look at no packaging alternatives, as well as reusable packaging alternatives, in that order of preference. The Fottle doesn't fall into either category."
Such moves are a long way from the corporate agenda. What is there to sell in Hopper's scenario of cleaning fluids sold in local shops in big vats with taps? Not 57 (slightly) different varieties lining up on supermarket shelves competing for an edge with brightly coloured packaging emblazoned with words like "new", "bonus", "save" — and "environmentally friendly".
Broader questions of social and economic organisation need to be addressed. As the Business Review Weekly noted in April 1990, the green revolution "in many cases, challenges the existence of mass-market consumer products". Green movement watchers in the business sector explicitly advise companies to find ways to lead, rather than react to the debate.
The same challenge applies to the green movement.
Hopper says, "I think we need to move away from the concept of large multinational companies and businesses to really achieve some of the important changes in society, in the way we impact on this planet. Big centralised organisations and businesses aren't the way of the future. We need to scale down our operations, do things in a decentralised manner."