I’m curious, would you say agree a product like Clorox should be able to claim ‘green’ by simply having a product that “contains over 99% natural ingredients that are biodegradable”? What about their impact on the environment during shipping of the product? The cardboards that the original cleaners came in? Maybe, as consumers we should place pressure on businesses to also unveil their carbon foot print on products. This way, conscious consumers can make a smarter choice as to the products they’re buying, rather being mislead with the words “green”, “eco”, “all natural”, etc.

Hi Moses, Very interesting comment and questions… – thank you!

Hmm…I don’t think there’s much that a company like Clorox “forgets.” In fact, I remember vividly how many of the top graduates from my undergrad university competed for positions within Clorox. Clorox attracts the best and the brightest employees and management talent ….this packaging issue and the recycling issue with their Brita filters were not “forgotten,” but were surely calculated decisions based on Return on Investment and their assessment of public interest in these issues.

And to your questions, they raise a bigger issue…as you peel back layers of the onion, so to speak, how deep do you go to green your product? I do think that a company can claim a product is “green” by having 99% natural ingredients…I think the Green Works product has many positive things going for it…it really works (as I’ve blogged previously) and it is priced right…so the masses can finally adopt green cleaning.

But I think there is a bare minimum of other sustainable packaging issues that green consumers demand….and that more consumers will demand as we all become more aware of the impact of environmental issues.

In this case, I think we need to hold Clorox to a very high standard because as a leader in packaging and marketing, they set the standards for so many other companies to follow. What’s more, they are purposely claiming they are going green to capture the green consumer. They do make Green Work refill bottles available, they’re just not distributed well enough at this point.

And they fought a public fight over recycling of water bottles, encouraging people to switch to Brita filters, without ever making arrangements for recycling their own filters! They can’t just claim “the infrastructure is not there.” There’s much more a company with Clorox’s resources can do to make progress in that area. Here are just a few ideas: What about contributing funding towards building filter recycling facilities in a few areas of the country where most of their filters end up? How about helping public works departments develop the specs that will enable Brita filter recycling? How about studying how the Brita filters are recycled in Europe? Simply saying it’s not possible is not enough…

– Lynn