GREEN ECONOMY:SOMETIMES, WHEN you're elbow deep in the Brabantia bin bag and you feel the cold wetness of yesterday's spaghetti carbonara slip through your fingers, smugness is pretty much all you have. That feeling of doing the right thing by living the green life is, however, almost certainly misplaced, according to Daniel Goleman.
Not that he wants us to stop trying. The former New York Times science correspondent and bestselling author is vehemently in the green corner. But after years of research he’s come to realise the complexity of the backstory of the products we buy on a daily basis.
“Everyone who wants to do the right thing has only a small part of the jigsaw puzzle on which to base their decisions,” says Goleman, whose 1995 mega hit Emotional Intelligence has sold over five million copies. “We don’t yet really know what we mean by being green. The term is being redefined.”
His new book, Ecological Intelligence, champions the emerging discipline of industrial ecology, which Goleman refers to several times during our interview as a "disruptive technology". It's not new – industrial ecology has been around for over a decade – but when linked to today's open-source communications media, Goleman heralds an era of "radical transparency". By using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA), the history of each product can be revealed, with surprising results.
“The industrial ecologists render precise metrics for impacts on the environment, on our health and on the wellbeing of those who labour to make our stuff,” says Goleman. He cites the example of the humble glass pasta jar, which in fact has 1,959 discrete steps in its development process, each of which has myriad impacts, from carbon costs and water use to the wellbeing of the workers who make it.
“We are making glass and concrete in the same way we did 100 years ago when we didn’t know about this stuff,” he says. “We still make glass by heating silica and a batch of chemicals to about 1,100 degrees for 24 hours – a method that dates from the 1850s.” His t-shirt, he says, was sold as being made of “organic cotton”. That’s got to be good, right? No, the cotton-making process uses around 2,500 litres of water. “Then there is the T-shirt’s dye: many textile dyes are carcinogenic and workers in third-world dye houses are prone to higher rates than normal of leukaemia.”
He urges us to look beyond the greenwashing claims of the marketing industry and his book takes a holistic approach, following products from the extraction of raw materials, the industrial processes that make a product, packaging, transporting, time in store, even what happens while you use it, and then disposal. This exhaustive process has, until recently, been beyond the scope of all but the deepest of green lobbyists, but Goleman is championing a movement to bring it out in to the open. It is this “radical transparency” that will change markets and business behaviour, he hopes.
The Good Guide (goodguide.com) draws on 200 databases, including life-cycle analyses, to help shoppers make more informed decisions.
This simplicity is critical. So complex is the green buying decision that information overload is a real deterrent to many consumers. By boiling the information down to a single figure on a one to 10 scale, the Good Guide offers a quick and easy way of navigating the aisles.
“It sums it all up: environmental, health and social impacts, and gives a number on a 10-point rating scale and compares it to comparable products. There are 70,000 products rated, and more every day.”
Goleman has been pushing for the big retailers in the US to show the Good Guide figure at point of sale, next to the price. Armed with this information, he says, today’s consumers can see through what he describes as “the vital lies” told by producers and retailers, in particular the biggest, most commercially valuable lie of them all: “green”.
“Green,” he says is an illusion once you understand life-cycle analysis. But the key market lies beyond the converts. He cites a survey of 25,000 Marks Spencer shoppers, which found that about a quarter are “simply not interested in the environmental pedigree of the things they buy”, while just 10 per cent were of the opposite view and would go out of their way to shop for more ecologically virtuous items.
It’s in the middle of these extremes that the challenge lies, says Goleman: the majority of people for whom the issue is vaguely on their radar but who might be put off by its complexity, or who feel that the problem is so big that their micro decisions have no impact.
“This is a real entrepreneurial opportunity,” says Goleman. “I’m predicting a major trend which will change the nature of winning and losing in the business sector. The smartest ones will take a lead before the issue reaches a critical mass.” He says Procter Gamble has carried out extensive life-cycle analyses of its product mix to find its worst impacts on global warming, with practical results. The company has identified a new market for cold-water detergents, which reduces the impact of having to heat water each time we clean our clothes.
Wal-Mart, the American retail giant, is also pushing its suppliers to account for the life cycle of their products. These are the biggest names on the American high street, says Goleman, and they are acting not because governments are forcing them to but because they see a real business return.
Alongside the Good Guide movement sits a host of other pilot projects including Skin Deep, an LCA site focused on the cosmetics and healthcare industry. Then there is Earthster, an open-source information system designed to evaluate a product’s life-cycle assessment relative to industry norms and help suppliers and bulk buyers spot ecological upgrades that will improve the product’s rating.
Earthster attempts to make the system scalable, with the hope that “one day all items in Wal-Mart’s aisles will have a sustainability rating”, starting with the retailer’s 3,500 own-brand products. “We expect usage to scale exponentially by next year,” says Gregory Norris, an industrial ecologist who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health. “Roughly 20 per cent of factories in China are said to be somewhere in the supply chain for Wal-Mart’s suppliers. “If this comes to the Wal-Mart supply chain, it’s on its way to the global economy,” says Norris.
"Tomorrow's shoppers will be even more demanding and discerning," says Goleman, pushed by today's bottom-up media model. The Story of Stuff, an internet film made by a green activist, is one such example, further poking the debate.
It works in the mode of Al Gore's Oscar-winning eco-documentary An Inconvenient Truth, highlighting waste and the broader social impacts of products. The film is a hit with American college kids, which in turn is changing the nature of what is being studied on courses such as business and environmental science, even economics.
Armed with this information, it may not be long before doing the right thing becomes a whole lot easier.
