There’s reality. And then there’s perception. And when you’re talking about business, there’s ulterior motive. Nowhere is this more blatantly true (and less obvious) than in the rush to “green” products.

Think back to when the “green” movement was known as the “ecology” movement. Remember the brouhaha about grocery bags? First, we were told that paper sacks resulted in killing too many trees, so grocers switched to plastic bags. Then the ecoNazis preached that the plastic bags were bad, as they used fossil fuels, and were therefore killing the planet – not to mention their inability to gracefully decompose in landfills. Today, most supermarkets offer your choice of “paper or plastic,” and have recently started shilling “reusable” bags. A recent episode of the wickedly funny ABC prime time cartoon The Goode Family, the social-climbing mom forgot her reusable totes (6:43 to 7:40 in the clip above) when shopping at the grocery store. Faced with disapproving looks from the other greenies at the market, she finally blurted out, “Load me up…I know a lot of people are comfortable with reusable bags, but I’m not. Those bags are made in sweatshops.” The other shoppers are promptly stricken by kind of Liberal Guilt only someone who is desperately trying to live up to an impossible, illogical standard can feel.

Recently, bottled water has come into the cross-hairs of the Greens. You see, the ecoNazis see the bottles as the problem. (If you do the math on what they get for bottled water per gallon, you’d find that it’s more expensive than Premium gasoline. THERE’S your problem. Not the bottle.) So they are doing their best to kill the market for bottled water. Of course, up unitl about 15 years ago, there was no real market for bottled water. You had your Perrier sparkling water, and that was about it. Then the health food craze hit the public consciousness, and (coupled with stories about micro-organisms in the public water supply like cryptosporidium – which sounds like some sort of terrorist-created poison gas), bottled water took off like gangbusters. The bitter irony? The same people that are health conscious in the extreme are – you guessed it – ecoNazis. So the campaign against the humble disposable  plastic bottle begins.

Here’s more irony. When I was a kid, soft drinks came in glass bottles. Recyclable glass bottles. You drank a six-pack or two, then returned the bottles for a rebate of a nickel per bottle. The grocers returned the bottles to the bottling plant, where they were sterilized, refilled, and sold again, over and over. You could easily do the same sort of thing with plastic bottles but now that the supermarkets and bottlers no longer have to mess with recycling, they’d rather not start it up again, thank you very much.

Now, bottlers know a good deal when they see one. Water is cheap to acquire, cheap to bottle, and highly profitable. They don’t want that market to go away. So they are desperately trying to do something…anything…to keep their business, um…afloat. Ozarka has come up with a very PC-esque solution: make the bottles with less plastic. (This is the kind of gesture that torpedoed W’s last term as President, and blew his street cred as a conservative, but I digress.) Ozarka is pitching this as their “Eco-Shape® Bottle,” made with “30% less plastic to be easier on the environment.” They follow this up with a whiney “We can all make a difference — please recycle.”

Um. Yeah. THAT will convince the ecoNazis.

In practice, the Eco-Shape bottles are a disaster. As you drink the water out of the bottle, the 30% less plastic translates into a bottle that tends to get crushed in even the most gentle of grips, spilling water everywhere.

So what’s the real solution? Well, I can’t speak for the rest of America, but I buy one bottle of water, then refill the bottle over and over again. This gives me a convenient container, and I don’t waste so much plastic. At the grocery, half the time we get plastic (and reuse them for cleaning up the litter box) and half the time paper (and use them instead of kerosene, to start our natural wood fires in our grill). By the way, I live in Texas…you’ll get me to stop grilling when you pry my grill tools outta my cold, dead hands.

The idea of reducing the amount of plastic in a bottle has a logical point of diminishing returns. Ozarka passed that point, when they made collapsible bottles, regardless of their intent. If and when grocery stores are forced to stop offering paper or plastic bags, I’ll have to find something else to use for cat litter disposal, and another way to start my fires. That will simply drive the cost up for me to take care of our pets and to cook. But in my experience, so-called Progressives seldom stop to think about the hidden costs of their ideas. They’d much rather strike a morally superior pose, and if they going gets rough, exempt themselves from their own ideas, under the guise that the ends justify their means.

I’m all for cutting out waste. I’m all for “saving the planet” (never mind that I find it the height of egotism that Progressives both believe the planet can’t survive the “assault” of humanity upon it, and that anything we do will have the least effect on it in the long term). But when half-baked ideas are pushed past common sense, and force changes to our lives that accomplish nothing but lining the pockets of opportunistic companies trying to change the rules to make a buck, that’s where I draw the line.

We don’t need to stop selling bottled water, forbid grocery stores to give out sacks (paper OR plastic), or force incandescent light bulbs off the shelves. We need to stop wasting stuff, start saving money, and stop listening to politicians and special-interest groups that would pervert marketing into a propaganda tool to turn consumers into sheeple.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 at 8:37 pm and is filed under advertising, design, marketing, media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.