It began with niggling worries that perhaps, after so many millennia, the planet could not take it any more. As vast tracts of trees stood stripped by acid rain, as men pillaged hectares of precious rainforest by the second, and as bloated and poisoned fish floated down the rivers, the niggling worries grew to an international realisation that Something Had To Be Done. People realised that the green radicals had been right all along. It was time to stop polluting the earth.

Like politicians as geographically apart as Bob Hawke and Margaret Thatcher, like many major industrial corporations, grocers are going green. They too have become caring capitalists, quick off the mark. They have to be. Environmental awareness is their means of survival, as well as that of planet Earth.

Australia's greenest grocer stands to increase its position in the $10 billion-a-year national industry as well as to earn invaluable brownie points from environmental lobbyists and consumers keener than ever to buy products which do not pollute and poison them or the world they live in.

Coles New World supermarkets and the NSW chain of Cut Price Deli stores were no doubt aware of this when, last month, the two became the first Australian retailers to introduce photo-degradable plastic shopping bags. These bags break down into dust after being exposed to sunlight. No longer will the 514 million bags the two companies' customers use each year be left to litter the world. And in Sunbury, outside Melbourne, Coles has opened the first supermarket to use refrigeration free of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

Similarly aware of such considerations is the Victorian chain of food halls Just Fresh, which relaunched its stores in June. They use recycled butchers' paper instead of polystyrene trays and plastic film, and have introduced systems for recycling cardboard and paper, returning shopping bags and fostering the use of organically grown fruit vegetables and fresh juice.

Only a few days after these three announcements came Woolworth Ltd's proud introduction of unbleached loo paper&emdash;but it will still cost the same as the traditional bleached product. To come this month and next are unbleached filter papers for coffeemaking, imported by Melitta House of Coffee Pty Ltd, and biodegradable garbage bags, courtesy of Glad Products of Australia.

Many more such environmentally friendly products will follow in the race to go green. It's inevitable, says Mike Kelly, corporate relations general manager for Woolworths. "Everyone is up and running. We're very conscious of the environment and we've always had the basic concern that products should be good for the consumer. By December this year, there should be no more aerosols in our stores. And we've changed our buying practices. We're asking manufacturers: do products require that amount of packaging?

"One of our suppliers of polystyrene trays has eliminated CFCs in manufacture, and one of our Victorian Safeway stores is trialling bins for recycling plastics. And we'd be more than happy to trial organically grown fruit and vegetables."

Says Ross Corrigan from Coles New World: "This is a phenomenon which had developed very rapidly this year and the time is now right to launch products which are more environmentally conscious&emdash;unbleached paper products, less packaging, applying environmental considerations to a whole gamut of goods and services. It is not just a single issue."

And John Travato, marketing manager of cut-price Franklins, is busy examining his shelves and experimenting with various forms of degradable bags.

Franklins, with 117 stores in NSW and 19 in Victoria, has only an estimated 10 per cent share of the very competitive grocery market. Woolworths, with 430 stores throughout Australia as well as 140 Safeway stores, is considered to lead the market with a 27 per cent share, followed by Coles, with 371 stores and 25 per cent of the market.

These two chains have more to win or lose from a greener-than-thou policy than Franklins. At the beginning of the year, before talk of the greenhouse effect swelled to a national obsession, the two were preparing for a fresh-food war. Coles appointed advertising agency George Patterson Pty Ltd to its $30 million account. Woolworths was said to be spending the same amount on its advertising. Both wanted to boost their image as quality, fresh-food retailers. They had looked to the United States and seen that 30 per cent of the American market was aimed at consumers who were prepared to pay higher prices for better fresh produce.

Then came green power, a movement at least two decades old for serious environmentalists, but fresh among the concerns of that ubiquitous and omnipotent demographic group, the baby boomers, and of the younger yuppies and dinks. The English green marketing consultant, Julia Hailes, says green consumers are the hippies of the '60s who later became the middle class but never lost faith in the notion that they could still, somehow, somewhere, effect change in their lives. That movement, as well as the growing demand for fresh unprocessed food, could not be ignored.

In England, the giant Tesco chain was not slow in reacting. Last January, it announced an across-the-board plan to go green. Shelves were stocked with phosphate-free detergents, organic fruit and vegetables, environmentally friendlier nappies (purists claim the only really friendly nappy is one made from cloth) and CFC-free aerosols. It gave away 20 million leaflets on healthier eating, printed, of course, on recycled paper.

Soon, other supermarket groups including Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer, joined the quest for goods that fitted Tesco's slogan: "Products that don't cost the earth."

At the same time, London marketing strategists and consultants were discovering through surveys not only that 24 per cent of British adults should be regarded as strongly green, but also that a steadily increasing number of people were prepared to pay more for ecologically sound goods. In April this year, a poll found that 21 per cent were willing to pay 50 per cent more for detergents which were completely waterfriendly, 26 per cent were willing to pay 15 to 25 per cent more and another 30 per cent were prepared to pay 5 to 10 per cent more.

The same poll found 72 per cent would, if given the choice, never buy an aerosol unless it was environmentally friendly and 61 per cent would avoid buying timber products made from endangered species.

Retailers were discovering what politicians already knew, some to their irreversible loss&emdash; the greens were no longer an isolated lobby. They had become an unprecedentedly powerful consumer movement. Any remaining sceptics had to be convinced by soaring sales of green consumer products in England. The West German battery manufacturers Varta, for example, increased their UK market share from one to 13 per cent in less than six months after an advertising campaign stressed that Varta batteries were free of mercury and cadmium. AEG whitegoods enjoyed a 30 per cent sales increase in six months after a campaign said its refrigerators were energy efficient and recycled chemicals. And even though Peau Douce, manufacturers of disposable nappies, had only a seven-hour lead over competitor Proctor and Gamble in announcing a range of non-chlorine-bleached nappies, it still increased its market share 5 per cent.

No wonder major manufacturers here, including the giants Lever and Kitchen, and Colgate Palmolive, have prepared a swag of media handouts defending existing products and are plotting the launch of bigger, better and greener products. All under recycled wraps, of course.

Glad Australia expects unprecedented sales of its new biodegradable garbage bag, which has a cornstarch additive to catalyse its eventual breakdown. Business manager Peter Hendy opts for these rather than photo-degradable bags. He points out that such bags must be left in the sun for six weeks to decompose. In reality, most will be contained within larger bags, or swept under earth at rubbish tips, where light will not reach them.

"It is really a bandaid solution to the social problem of litter," Hendy says. "People shouldn't throw their rubbish away. It is our belief that recycling is a very efficient way of dealing with this problem, and this is where local councils could make a major contribution. But in the end, to make it work, you have to bring it all back to the kitchen and somehow get people to sort their garbage."

Meanwhile, Melitta cannot wait for its boatload of coffee filters to dock. When they do, they will be in stores as quickly as humanly possible.

Samuel Taylor has already eliminated CFCs from its aerosol products and all the company's cans now bear an "environment friendly" label.

The consequences of worldwide green consumerism are immense, according to Colin Wilson-Brown, of the advertising agency Magnus Nankervis and Curl. "Many of us are going to be shocked by the speed of change in consumers' minds. It's not a passing phase and we're all going to have to learn to live with that, to be much more flexible."

To help retailers do that, Environmental Marketing Services has set itself up to solve green marketing problems. Three months ago, there was one employee, Malcolm Swain. Now there are five, and the telephones ring all day.

Concentration on biodegradable or photo-degradable bags is sidestepping the major issue, which is the need to reduce the use of plastics, replacing most with recycled paper.

Two books will soon translate the ecospeak into household English. Shopsafe, the Australian Green Consumer Guide, to be published by Century on August 23, was written by former journalist Margaret Gore. "We spent a lot of time in supermarkets, reading labels and listening to shoppers," she says. "It was soon clear that many people didn't understand the labelling at all." Gore's book, to be sold at newsagents and supermarkets, will list safe green products and explain labelling and how to run a greener household. The publishers have also introduced a phone-in service&emdash;the Green Hotline, 0055 23456&emdash;for an update on safe products.

Another book, to be published by Penguin in October has been compiled by Choice magazine and the Australian Conservation Foundation. It will incorporate sections from Julia Hailes's English consumer guide for greens, which is still on the best-seller list having sold 250,000 copies.

Despite all the eagerness to meet consumer demands, many environmentalists are not convinced, even though they see the greening of supermarkets motivated by social responsibility as well as profit.

Although grateful for a free roll of unbleached lavatory paper sent to her by Woolworths, Dr Kate Short, from the Total Environment Centre in Sydney, regards such moves as "shifting deckchairs on the Titanic".

Various retailers have offered Short consultancy work, but she has so far rejected the terms of employment as being inadequate. "We believe that to tackle the approach genuinely requires a longterm commitment and a lot more time, and it is necessary to work in consultancy with experienced environmentalists, people who have been working in this area for 20 years or more.

It is not a matter of grabbing headlines and winning the race," Short says. "That sort of attitude, I think, doesn't go down well with millions of Australians. A genuine changeover of necessity must take many years."

Back...