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IT IS EXACTLY a year since Britain’s greenest week. On 15 June 1989,
the Green Party swept up 15 per cent of the vote in the elections for the
European Parliament. And, of far more significance for industrialists, the
public relations company Mintel International announced the results of a
poll which showed that two-thirds of the British public was prepared to
pay more for environmentally friendly products. And they were talking serious
money. As many as 12 million people, Mintel concluded, would pay 27p in
the pound extra for green products such as toiletries and detergents.

The findings backed up the extraordinary sales for the cleverest green
product of all, The Green Consumer Guide by John Elkington and Julia Haile.
The book had shifted more than a quarter of a million copies since Gollancz
had published it the previous autumn. The Daily Telegraph, in reporting
on the Mintel survey, concluded that ‘we are moving away from the market-led
consumerism of the 1980s towards a new environmental-led consumerism’.

It was heady stuff. But where are we today? In the first by-election
that tested the new strength of the Green Party – that of Mid-Staffordshire
in March – the party lost its deposit. The same week, another bunch of market
researchers, at AGB Market Information, reported that the green consumer
bubble appeared to have burst. Supermarket shelves were stacked high with
unsold green products ranging from detergents to toiletries and nappies.
Only 14 per cent of shoppers said that they bought green goods – less than
half the market predicted by Mintel. And most of these green shoppers said
that they had bought only one such product. And why? Despite all the talk
in 1989 of money being no object, customers now said that green products
were too expensive.

All those people who last summer had said that they would pay more for
green goods had disappeared. Had they thought better of halting the greenhouse
effect after discovering the delights of a warm winter? Had they decided
that a couple of months of buying green washing powder would suffice to
save the world for the coming generation? Or were they strapped for cash
as the interest rates on their mortgages soared? Nobody was sure, but the
green decade appeared to be over almost before it had begun.

One cause was a growing cynicism about just how green the products they
were being offered were. Had green consumerism turned into a green con?
Jonathon Porritt, Britain’s best-known green and until recently director
of Friends of the Earth, had sounded the alarm back in those first weeks
of enthusiasm for all things green that followed the European elections.
‘Green consumerism is a target for exploitation. There’s a lot of green
froth on the top,’ he said at the 1989 conference of the Friends of the
Earth.

Other ‘deep greens’ went further. The Ecologist magazine, which has
purveyed a severe brand of green fundamentalism for more than 20 years under
its editor Teddy Goldsmith, warned that ‘underlying the current green consumer
boom is the idea that, with careful housekeeping, we can somehow have our
cake and eat it’. But this was ‘no different to a belief in perpetual motion’.
Consumerism, The Ecologist said in its Summer 1989 issue, was the problem
not the solution to the world’s ecological ills.

John Elkington, co-author of the best-selling The Green Consumer Guide
and arch apostle of a greener marketplace, stood his ground. He was an undoubted
beneficiary of the year’s events, from both his book and his green consultancy
services for companies anxious to brush up their image along with their
production processes. He insisted that consumers could exert a ‘positive
influence through our spending power’, and followed up his bookshelf success
with a Green Consumers’ Supermarket Shopping Guide (Gollancz).

But the ambivalence of the green movement, coupled with some splendidly
incompetent green copywriting by advertising agencies, sowed the seeds of
doubt in the public’s mind.

Friends of the Earth launched its ‘Green Con’ Awards in time for Christmas.
It was not short of candidates. One was Rover, the car maker, which was
fighting hard against a well-researched and soberly presented campaign from
Audi about how its cars were at any rate a little less un-green than other
people’s. Rover responded by filling newspapers with the claim that its
cars were ‘capable of running on unleaded petrol. This means it’s as ozone-friendly
as it is economical.’

How such scientific gibberish found its way into print is hard to tell.
The Advertising Standards Authority gained considerable coverage in newspapers
and on the television news pointing out that lead damages babies’ brains,
not the ozone layer. ‘We were green with ignorance,’ Rover told the press.

The ASA also put a stop to claims by BP, a company which has spent millions
of pounds fostering a green corporate image. BP had claimed that its new
‘Supergreen’ brand of lead-free petrol caused ‘no pollution to the environment’.
How about acid rain, urban smogs and the greenhouse effect for starters?
Most confusing of all for the green consumer was a furrier, Higgs of Essex,
which advertised its fox-fur coats as being environment-friendly because
the manufacture of artificial fur released chemicals that damage the ozone
layer, whereas killing real foxes did not.

Even the greenest of the tabloid newspapers, Today, could not resist
joining the bands of green revisionists intent on muddying the waters. ‘Animals
died for green soap suds’ claimed its front-page banner headline one day
last autumn. ‘Mice and rats were force-fed with Ariel Ultra until they died
to check that the detergent is safe for families.’

The publicity undermined the launch campaign by Proctor and Gamble for
its new product. In any case, many people were left confused by the claim
that ‘Ariel washes greener’. What did it mean? By March of this year, the
advertising executives of the television companies were following the lead
of the ASA in policing green claims in advertisements. The head of copy
clearance at the Independent Television Association announced new guidelines,
and said that advertisements ‘will have to make clear what the precise benefit
will be’.

The psychology of consumer reaction to green products would certainly
bear some investigation. The rule of thumb appears to be that shoppers feel
most guilty about using products that damage the environment if they are
aimed at making their lives clean. Hence the trail-blazing initial success
of phosphate-free detergents under the brand names Ecover and Ark.

The new detergents soaked up a share of the market, even though water
scientists insisted that the phosphate in washing powders was not really
a problem. They are only a minor source of the phosphates that turn up in
rivers and cause eutrophication, in which the plant life runs riot and consumes
the water’s oxygen because of an excess of nutrients such as phosphates.
Many shoppers probably confused phosphates with a vague memory of the mountains
of foam that once formed on British rivers because of foaming agents used
in washing powders. But these were banned years ago.

Customers showed an equal enthusiasm for washing-up liquid advertised
brazenly as phosphate-free. However, as Brian Moss from the Royal Society
of Chemistry pointed out in The Daily Telegraph in June 1989, ‘this product
never contains phosphates anyway’.

Top of the green-guilt stakes must be disposable nappies. We are storing
up who knows what environmental horrors by disposing of large amounts of
untreated faeces in our waste tips, all wrapped inside these nappies. The
pulp from which they are made also uses up countless trees.

Neither of these issues can be solved immediately without giving up
disposable nappies altogether – something which most parents today would
regard as unthinkable. So their guilt and dependence were ripe for exploiting
with nappies that were ever so slightly less damaging to the environment.
Hence the green nappies war.

It began with Peaudouce, a company based in Sweden, where in 1988, a
panic had erupted when the public learnt that tiny amounts of dioxin are
produced during the standard bleaching process for pulp. A small amount
of this dioxin was mixing with the effluent that pulp mills poured into
rivers. Worse, it was just possible that dioxin might stick around in the
nappies. Baby’s bum, one of the world’s most sensitive environments on which
parents lavish huge care, might be at risk.

Peaudouce was well placed to meet this threat, having recently introduced
a new pulp plant which used a different chlorine-free, dioxin-free process.
Its advertising agency, Connell, May and Stevenson, was soon at work with
copylines such as ‘Green peace’ and ‘Eau-zone friendly.’ Peaudouce’s share
of the nappy market in Britain jumped from 8 to 13 per cent.

Other firms, including Procter and Gamble, leapt aboard the bandwagon.
Peaudouce tried to keep one step ahead by offering a plastic lining that
was ’81 per cent biodegradable’. Soon, it promised, its glues would be biodegradable.
The respected environment newsletter, ENDS Report (ENDS stands for the Environmental
Data Services), played party-pooper by reporting what the Swedish analysts
Stora had found. Effluent from a typical chlorine-free bleaching process,
while certainly dioxin-free, killed more fish in LD50 toxicity tests.

Another conundrum has been green investment services. With major international
industrial companies (which almost by definition are major polluters as
well) investing in a green image, what exactly might a green investment
be? The idea is most developed in the US, where various socially aware investment
funds have a venerable history. But even there, it turned out that green
investment services were putting their money into companies that many environmentalists
placed high on their list of do-badders.

One American review, published in the journal Catalyst, found that ‘for
the most part, these funds invest in firms specialising in toxic and hazardous
waste clean-up, air and water pollution control and incineration plants’.
For example, the Environmental Awareness Fund listed among its investments
the manufacturers of nuclear power plants and waste management firms that
had featured in complaints from environment groups. Such firms argue that
they are in the business of cleaning up the environment. The review concluded
that ‘these companies are not out to heal the Earth – they are set up to
cash in on the booming waste industry. They directly benefit from the production
of wastes. We should be channelling our investment dollars into ways of
minimising the production of wastes.’

Similar fears emerged in Britain, where, according to The Independent
newspaper, 150 financial services bearing some kind of green label were
launched during 1989. The first investment portfolio of the Fellowship Trust,
a green personal equity plan, included shares in Rentokil, a pest-control
company that trades on a green image but nonetheless uses large amounts
of pesticides which the environmental groups frown upon. The trust also
put money into Coalite which, while manufacturing smokeless fuel, had an
unenviable reputation for causing serious air and water pollution around
its factories.

Through all the rows and disillusion over green consumerism, one issue
has stood out. How do you define a green product? Is a dioxin-free disposable
nappy green? How about lead-free petrol, or a waste disposal company? If,
as many argue, the national distribution systems behind supermarket chains
are inherently damaging to the environment, what do we make of a green supermarket
guide. Is it a contradiction in terms? Government labelling schemes and
rigorous checks on advertising claims would help. They might even encourage
those people who last year toyed with paying more to buy green but felt
they were being conned. But the dilemmas will remain. Many ozone-friendly
products may turn out to be greenhouse-unfriendly. New CFC-free fridges
will be advertised as the ultimate green product for your home. But in most
homes refrigerators are the biggest single item on the electricity bill
– and therefore the biggest cause of the greenhouse effect, apart from the
family car. Fridges could today be between 25 and 50 per cent more efficient
in their use of energy. So could cars. But will either of them be? And will
we be told? The bad news is that until manufacturers can be persuaded to
address more of the major environmental issues of the day, rather than indulging
in short-term gimmicks, there is little hope of green consumers making a
real contribution to a better planet. The good news is that for companies
willing to look beyond advertising copylines for their philosophy, there
may be rich pickings.