No Longer Green with Envy

VS

Environmentally-friendly products often cost more for a number of reasons: they are niche products so the economies of scale are not as great and the ingredients often cost more than their non-green counterparts. While such consumer products were a growing market segment before the economy tanked, the decline in sales in such green goods appears to be a barometer of American sentiments on our longer-term prospects.

Some of this contraction, where a smaller carbon footprint becomes economical, is manifest in ways other than a reduction in dollar volume. For example, as energy costs have soared and as people can’t afford as much, folks seem to want to buy smaller homes. “The average home size peaked in 2006 at 2,268 square feet and has seen a steady decline to 2,100 square feet… Along with the shrink in size, fewer amenities like three car garages, decks, and patios are making it into the average home’s final plans. On the other hand, the number of bed- and bathrooms has remained steady, meaning more is being done with less…” StudioDec.com, December 30, 2010.

But the stuff we buy in grocery stores has changed too: “As recession gripped the country, the consumer’s love affair with green products, from recycled toilet paper to organic foods to hybrid cars, faded like a bad infatuation. While farmers’ markets and Prius sales are humming along now, household product makers like Clorox just can’t seem to persuade mainstream customers to buy green again… Sales of Green Works have fallen to about $60 million a year, and those of other similar products from major brands like Arm & Hammer, Windex, Palmolive, Hefty and Scrubbing Bubbles are sputtering… For instance, a 32-oz bottle of Clorox Green Works All-Purpose cleaner is $3.29 at Stop & Shop. A 32-ounce bottle of Fantastik cleaner, by contrast, costs $2.89…

“‘You see disproportionately negative impact from products like Green Works, out of the big blue-chip companies that have tried to layer a green offering on top of their conventional offering, and a relatively better performance from the niche players who remain independent,’ said Stephen Powers, an analyst at Bernstein. Using data from the Nielsen company, Bernstein looked at sales for nearly 4,300 items in 22 categories, like cleaning spray, liquid soap, bathroom cleaners and detergents. It studied monthly sales from March 2006 to March 2011, the most recent data available. (Nielsen’s data includes mass market, grocery stores and drugstores but excludes Wal-Mart.)” New York Times, April 21^st.

Famed Psychology professor Abraham Maslow, writing in the 1940s, presented his hierarchy of human needs (the above pyramid), which tells us that human beings move to higher considerations as lower level needs are fulfilled. The recession has clearly pushed folks back to basics, now willing to forget about the future just to survive in the present. We can see that in the above statistics as well in the incredibly short-sighted push in Congress and various state legislatures – responding to popular pressures probably created by feelings expressed in Maslow’s pyramid – willing to sacrifice our future by abandoning educational priorities, curtailing infrastructure projects and cutting funding to both scientific research and the arts. The strangest part of these contractions is that they lead to further hard dollar costs – eventually pushing at the consumer consciousness – from environmental damage or loss of competitive advantage.

I’m Peter Dekom, and yes it takes political guts for our elected representatives to secure our future, and right now there is an exceptional death of fortitude among politicians.