Hunter: Eco-labeling should be more responsible

Green is considered a relaxing color. It invokes images of leaves rustling in trees, prairie… Green is considered a relaxing color. It invokes images of leaves rustling in trees, prairie grasses blowing in the wind and takes us to a place we perceive as calmer and simpler than our hectic modern lives. But in the past several years, the term “green” has taken on a connotation that has nothing to do with color. One that, in spite of its ties to nature, sometimes makes me want to scream.

I’m of course referring to the popularity of the now cliché phrase “going green,” the morphed form of environmentalism that in many cases is a meaningless trend.

I admit that it is fantastic that environmental concepts such as energy efficiency and wastefulness are in the public eye now. Who would have thought 10 years ago that carrying a reusable water bottle would be hip with anybody but crunchy weirdos? But like any issue that goes mainstream, many key points of the environmental movement have been simplified or just plain bastardized. This is partly because of the necessity of making concepts clearer and easier to understand for mass audiences, but it’s also due to the work of marketers and advertisers who decided to capitalize on a spreading wave of eco-awareness in the nation.

We see this in a proliferation of green merchandise: a line of nifty shoulder bags with pictures of trees on them, metal and plastic bottles emblazoned with the word “green,” useful objects that become more status symbols specifically marketed to those swept up in the eco-hullabaloo.

And while, yes, it’s true that eating out of a reusable container is better than going through a billion plastic bags, the notion that one must go out and purchase something new (and trendy) to do this goes against the original ethos of reusing what one already has. This new environmentalism is a far stretch from the custom of my mom’s days of drinking water from old Mason jars.

That’s what this marketing has done: turned something very anti-commercial into a commodity. It’s like the irony behind Che Guevara merchandise — the fact that the face of perhaps one of the most vocal critics of capitalism appears on so many useless products.

But nobody who buys a Che T-shirt is thinking about that, because we don’t usually mull over the things we buy — and this is what marketers bank on for eco-labeling. They have figured out how to get consumers’ attention, not by making their products less wasteful, but just by making us believe that they are.

Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission addressed this deceptiveness by updating their aptly named “Green Guides” for environmental marketing for the first time since 1998. According to The New York Times, the new revisions demand greater transparency and straightforwardness on the part of marketers. For example, companies cannot use labels such as “eco-friendly” unless they can back up that claim with specific examples.

The revisions also force companies to clearly state whether an environmental label on their product was certified by a third party or by the company itself. It was because of this last stipulation that the FTC came down on SC Johnson last year, denouncing the usage of its “Greenlist” label, which appeared to be a third party certification but was in fact just a marketing ploy of the company.

It was nice to see the FTC recognizing the increased crookery behind eco-labeling, but as the changes to the guidelines are not monumental — mainly just clarifications of previously vague points — I can’t see them making a huge dent in sneaky advertising. As long as marketers know that eco-friendliness is something consumers desire, they will continue to pursue it. If anything, they will just get subtler and more manipulative in their methods.

Take, for example, the current ad campaigns of Wendy’s and McDonald’s: “You know when it’s real” and “What we’re made of,” respectively. Wendy’s ads display cascading piles of cocoa and skim milk when talking about its pseudo-ice cream treat, the Frosty, and McDonald’s spells out the words in its slogan with whole foods like fruits, vegetables and eggs. They emphasize the “realness” of their products to distract us from the fact that, oh yeah, they’re still the epitome of processed food.

And what about the use of that other oh-so-ambiguous descriptor, “natural?” This is one of my favorites, since anything derived from a plant, be it cardboard or high fructose corn syrup, can technically be called natural. I know this word has almost no meaning, and reading it on labels in grocery stores invites nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a shake of the head.

So what’s next? As consumers wise up and demand to be treated like rational human beings deserving of the truth, where will advertisers and marketers go? How will they next figure out how to not only trick us into buying things that we don’t really want or need, but trick us into believing those things are something they’re not?

It is the vain hope of this frustrated consumer that advertising abandon the charade and try something novel: like actually providing us with solid information about previously unknown products. Maybe then we could finally navigate through the muck of false messages to find what we really want, what’s actually real.

Write Kayla at  kah117@pitt.edu.