I’m 95% sure that this is greenwashing, but for a different product, it would be wonderful. This is a perfume. I don’t understand why these companies think that they can promote a product like perfume as one that will help save the environment. You can promote something as not being as harmful, but if you spray this perfume on trees, will they really become full and green once more?

I dislike ads that point out problems, but don’t tell you what you can do about the problem. There should be a solution as well. I guess there is an implied solution of recycling your plastic bags, but what about not using plastic bags at all? Crazy thought.

Nice one, but once again offers no solutions.

So then what are we supposed to do with our trash? Put it on Mars?

AT&T announced that they are going to do more to go green. To do this, they are going to appeal to their customers to switch to paperless billion and as part of a partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation, will plant a tree for every customer that does.

This doesn’t impress me very much. While I do prefer paperless billing (no one wants all that junk mail), it is a lot easier to remember to pay your bills if you have a physical copy of the bill sitting on your desk, rather than just a reminder e-mail that get lost in the rest of your spam mail. The younger demographic will probably answer this call to go paperless, but many of the older generation still do not trust the internet that much. And while planting trees is great, it won’t actually do anything to offset your carbon footprint. The trees that take in the most CO2 reside at the equator of the earth — the rainforests. Planting trees away from that will have very little impact on the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. In theory, it’s a good idea and it can never hurt to have more trees, but I don’t think that it’s actually doing anything.

What really impresses me is their research into “automatic zero-draw” chargers. When you leave your phone charger plugged in, it’s using electricity — whether something is plugged into the other end or not. We learned all about this in class with the Belkin Conserve. Genius! I know that I am completely guilty of leaving in my phone charger even when it’s not plugged into anything. We all live busy lives and at the end of the day, you really just want to crash in your bed and not have to fiddle with finding the socket behind your bed.

“Device chargers have gained notoriety for their ability to suck “phantom power” from the grid, i.e., they continue to consume electricity whether they are charging a device or not.

AT&T will officially launch its ZERO charger in May. The charger has a 5-star efficiency rating, which exceeds the standards set by GSMA,” according to environmentalleader.com.

AT&T also announced at the beginning of March that they have started a packing initiative that they claim will save up to 200 tons in waste per year simply by reducing the amount of packaging that comes with a new cell phone. Thank God. We all want our new phones to arrive to us safe and sound, but that packaging is ridiculous — on par with USB Flash drives.

Envrionmentalleader.com says this is all because, “Last year, AT&T hired an energy director to help it reduce its carbon footprint. It also created a sustainability advisory council comprised of AT&T staff, as well as third parties including the Carbon Disclosure Project, Cisco Systems, The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the University of Colorado Denver, and University of Texas at Austin.”

Case and point: my internship.

I recently finished up an internship with Popp!e Advertising and Design Studios. It was great. I got a local internship while I was taking classes, which helped make up for the fact that I couldn’t get one this summer (I was recovering from back surgery). But their office is located on the other side of Eugene, about 5 miles from my house. It’s winter, so most of the time it was pouring down rain and on most days, I had somewhere I needed to be within 30 minutes of my internship ending. Tuesdays and Thursdays I would get out of class at 1:50 p.m., catch the 2 p.m. bus home, arrive at 2:09 p.m., scarf down some food and leave by 2:15 p.m. to arrive by 2:30 p.m. Wednesdays I would have my internship from 9-11 a.m., get home by 11:15 a.m. to catch my bus to school at 11:30 a.m.

In all honesty, it would not have been possible for me to be able to take the classes that I wanted and gotten to work as many hours as I did at my internship if it wasn’t for my trusty Patrick the Jetta. Benatar the Bike just can’t stand up to that. I know that I had a blog post earlier about how when you have time for things like riding your bike everywhere, you actually save more money. But in this case, I was doing it for the experience, not for the money.

I don’t feel guilty that I own a car. It’s dead helpful, especially when you end up leaving work at midnight (when the buses stop running) and you have back problems already. I try to be gas efficient and really only use it when I need to, but sometimes I get a little lazy. I know people who are addicted to their cars and would rather drive 6 blocks to a destination that’s only 4 blocks away so they can find a parkins space. I don’t think I’m like this, but it’s important to be aware of your usage of your car (if you have one), so you know you’re still being sustainable.

Definitely not the most sustainable lifestyle.

In a perfect world, we would all use cloth hankies because they’re reuseable, turn off the tv and computer when we’re done with them, and buy all-natural medicines without all the excess packaging of my DayQuil Sinus. There are some people who can live like this and I really do salute them. But I am too weak to get up to turn off the tv, disgusted by hankies because I am currently producing snot like it’s going out of style and don’t care how sustainable my meds are as long as they work. I wash my hands about 20 times a day (after every time I sneeze) because I don’t want to spread the virus to my roommates, and take lng showers twice a day to get steam into my nose.

I consider myself a pretty sustainable person and I know that this is not a sustainable lifestyle for someone to live. However, I can barely take care of myself, much less the planet. This leads me to ask the question: are there times when it’s okay to not be sustainable?

I’ve been thinking lately about water.

There was recently an event on campus called Take Back the Tap and it was urging University Facilities to stop buying bottled water for their events. I like that. It has big goals, but is still attainable on a local level. Think global, act local and all that.

Then today I read an article from the NY Times about how all these people are getting mad at their water companies because pipes break, but at the same time, they don’t want to pay for the money to get the pipes fixed. Really?

For something as necessary as water, you’d better be prepared to pay for it to run properly. We have become so used to having it working and accessible, that the idea of having to, say, draw water from a well or a spring, is appalling. Water has become a magic thing that just comes and goes as we like. Sadly, this is not true everywhere.

Many countries still don’t have running water and even more than that don’t have proper sewage. This is something that we, as Americans, have become so used to having, and don’t even consider the fact that other people in the world are still lacking in these basic necessities.

I would love to launch a campaign for a non-profit to promote getting things like running water and proper sewage for countries that don’t have them.

“Everywhere you look, food is trying to impress you with how natural it is, but the message is vague and often misleading. What does “organic” actually mean? What separates “grass-fed” from “free range”? We’re separating real, meaningful labels from eco-hype.

Even if you couldn’t care less about the growing media presence and consumer curiosity around food sourcing and handling, it helps to know what you’re getting when you’re forced to pay more for certain goods.

If it was just one government agency that offered semi-descriptive labels, a la the USDA’s meat grades, there wouldn’t be much to talk about outside the shop talk of butchers. But meat and produce carry a lot of labels and statements these days, ranging from very official imprints to generic terms.”

So true. There are very few restrictions about how food can be labeled (or advertised), which just confuses consumers. We need to educate people about how to properly read these labels and create some standards with how things can be labled to avoid greenwashing.

One of the groups that presented this week spoke about the Pacific Trash Vortex. This is an amazing ad campaign done by a French ad agency. It’s completely genius (isn’t it amazing how the most genius ones are the simple ones?). It shows trash floating in the ocean. Above the water, it d0esn’t look so bad. But with the water magnification, the problem is a lot bigger. Wow. This is an amazing way to showcase the problem.

Advertising Agency: Young & Rubicam, Paris, France
Creative Director: Les 6
Art Director: Sébastien Guinet
Ass Art Director: Julien Hérisson
Copywriter: Josselin Pacreau
Photographer: Ben Stockley
Retoucher: Asile
Art buyer: Sylvie Réveillard
Model Maker: Jean Benne
Published: March 2010

A while ago, I found this blog post about PR and greenwashing. It has never made me happier. We talk a lot about how advertisers need to be careful that they are not greenwashing, but we hardly ever think about PR. This is stupid. PR people get the word out about companies just like advertisers, so it’s great to hear that they are aware of the same things that we know we need to be aware of. We all need to be working toward the same goal, no matter what your job title is.

In an article in the New York Times this week, it was told that Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, is attempting to delay the EPA’s issuing of new greenhouse gas emission caps from power plants and other major stationary sources.

The EPA’s timeline was to issue limits on carbon dioxide  pollution from vehicles this year in an agreement negotiated last year with major automakers. Rockefeller and other West Virginia representatives are issuing bills to “impose a two-year moratorium on potential federal regulation of carbon dioxise and other climate-altering gases” according to the article.

“This is a positive change and good progress, but I am concerned it may not be enough time. We must set this delay in stone and give Congress enough time to consider a comprehensive energy bill to develop the clean coal technologies we need,” Rockefeller said, according to the Times.

This is my issue on the matter: If this is too soon, when is the right time? What will we have accomplished in 2 years that will make this whole thing better? What moment are they waiting for that will suddenly make everything okay in the world of carbon emissions?

The time to act is now. Time and time again, scientists have stressed that we need to begin action now to affect change in the future. I know that West Virginia is a state that is heavy on coal and power production, so they are very likely to reisist these changes more than other states, but change needs to happen immediately.