Green Bling

Originally published on GenGreen.

When it come to the green marketplace there is a lot of sexy stuff: clothing, creams, computers, cars, and of course building products. Just about everything you can buy seems to have a green variation.

Marketers and designers have pounced on our want to do less damage to the planet by having us buy more stuff. That’s their job, but our job is to make sure we are not making purchases for the wrong reason. Green Bling is the environmental badge hanging on a product when that product, at best, takes a baby step to reducing it environmental foot print but shouts out its environmentalism. You have to cringe at a full sized GM SUV rolling past you with hybrid stickers and little green leaves all over it. All for two lousy gallons of saved gas per mile. Those $400 set of organic cotton bed sheets look pretty odd in a bedroom full of nylon carpet (a VOC emitter and sponge). That tote bag isn’t going to make that much difference relative to how you are taking your groceries home.

Looking good isn’t enough. An external hard drive clad in bamboo isn’t green unless it uses a lot less energy too. Your super non-VOC paint does little good if your furniture is new, cheap, and full of urea formaldehyde glues. Your new LCD TV that just replaced your 20 year old one is not nearly as energy efficient as replacing your 20 year old refrigerator.

Then there is the home itself. A house with super expensive countertops made from recycled paper is fine, unless you go to the mechanical room and find the furnace to be a cheap minimally efficient affair. Solar panels on the roof are really Green Bling when the insulation in the walls are inadequate. It’s that natural, green certified, architecturally envisioned home that has lots of glass all in the wrong places. The ultimate Green Bling to me is the green built trophy vacation house. Ouch.

I am not saying that buying all these things are the wrong thing to do, only that you should buy the sexy stuff only after you invested in the basics. When you do that you have every reason to brag when you are looking so good.