Its not easy being Green

In just one year the great green ground swell has : gone out with the tide. The shops still hold 'green' products but many are only superficial, as is customer support. Whither now, asks DEIRDRE MACKEN.

In 1989, when State environment ministers were handing out string bags at Coles supermarkets, when television specials were flashing images of putrid plastic bags in land fills and when school children were coaxing their mothers back to brown-paper lunch bags, the product manager of the Glad plastic bag company, Michael Lakeman, predicted a grim future.

"We thought our market would drop 20 per cent, perhaps within the year," says Lakeman.

At the same time, Kingsley Dunn, marketing manager for personal care at Kimberley-Clark, was trying to gauge the impact on the disposable-nappy market of "Dioxins in nappies" headlines. "We just didn't know what was going to happen," says Dunn.."When mothers hear reports about dioxins in nappies, you don't know how they're going to react. There were a lot of different opinions within the company, not many of them good."

Meanwhile, a few suburbs away, the Samuel Taylor company was rushing a range of "environmentally friendly" cleaners on to the market. The company was so confident of its green-spirited labelling that it didn't test the products' performances with consumers or research the name. The Down to Earth range was born in half the time it normally takes to launch a brand.

Today, the grocery trade is disappointed with only one of these companies. Can you guess which one? Here are a few clues. In March last year Federal Liberal Party polling found the environment was the fourth most pressing issue facing voters. A year later it ranked 10th. Early last year Australian film celebrities set up an action group, ECO, for the environment. ECO's phone is no longer connected. In mid-1989, Prime Minister Bob Hawke was planting the first of a billion trees. This year he introduced legislation to ensure that mills get supplies of timber.

Time's up. As far as the retail trade is concerned, it is the Down to Earth range that has most disappointed it, while the environmental "nasties" - the plastic bags and disposabb nappies -. have emerged from a marketing manager's worst nightmare almost unscathed.

What happened? Where is the green consumer who was going to set up five bins in the kitchen for separating the garbage, take the bus to work and don winter woollies to save on heating? How could Veronica McGowan, the Coles public-relations executive who helped MPs hand out string bags now say, "There's been no marked decrease in the use of plastic shopping bags"?

Last year electricity consumption increased 5.7 per cent and petrol sales grew 4 per cent. In the same period, production of plastics used to make bottles grew 5.5 per cent, while production of those used for polystyrene containers remained steady.

Back on the supermarket shelves, the first environmentally sound disposable nappy Econappy, has just been withdrawn; Glad's biodegradable plastic bag has been scrapped; the market share of eco-friendly toilet paper has dropped from17 per cent to10 per cent and the share of environmentally safe cleaners has been halved.

The waning support for green products is alarming green activists for a number of reasons. Firstly, as consumers we'd only just started to do the right thing; we were green-tinged at best and we can't afford a light shade. Secondly, if consumers don't show governments and business that they are serious about the environment, then those power brokers will not tackle the big environmental problems. And finally, the professional greens don't want to lose the momentum generated by the most intense, emotional ground swell of our time.

The green ground swell of 1989 was astounding. "You can pinpoint the moment it happened," says researcher Hugh Mackay. "It was January 1989. There were a couple of television programs on the environment and suddenly we went wild.

"It wasn't as if the greens were telling us anything new. Their basic message hadn't changed since the '70s, but as we got to the end of the '80s there was a readiness for a religious fervour. It was a yearning for something more spiritual.

"By the end of that year, the situation was changing radically; since then it's continued to cool. It's not that we've abandoned the concept, we're just more sensible and pragmatic."

The shifting community sentiments that Mackay has tracked in his research have been echoed in many other surveys.

Philosophical support for the environment is ebbing (the number who believe the threat is real dropped 8 percentage points to 79 per cent from mid-1989 to the end of 1990), but practical support is taking a duck-dive.

The Frank Small & Associate research group has found that fron November 1989 to September last year the number of concerned consumers who were prepared to buy environmentally friendly products dropped from 33 per cent to 17 per cent.

"To get up and say that nothing matters except the planet when people have lost their jobs and are losing their homes and barely able to pay for the necessities of life is just not on," says former Labor senator Susan Ryan, who has been one of the few vocal critics of the green fervour in her position as executive director of the Plastics Industry Association.

According to David McCaughan, research manager of McCann-Erickson advertising agency, "The recession has shown people what Canadian scientist David Suzuki's negative growth philosophy means. They can see how dramatically their lifestyle would change so, increasingly, they want to see a balance between green and economic issues."

But for the most graphic example of the gulf between consumer sentiment and reality we have to return to the Glad company, which introduced biodegradable plastic garbage bags in an attempt to prevent the erosion of a fifth of its market. Research suggested such a bag could get 20 per cent of the market.

But when it hit the market at a price three times that of its competitors, it got less than 1 per cent. Glad has learnt its lesson. It has since launched bags made from recycled plastics and priced them below competitors. Says Michael Lakeman, "It's not setting the world on fire; it has less than 2 per cent." If he doesn't sound worried, maybe it is because the total plastic bag market has slipped only 2 per cent.

It takes more than money to be a good green. When you swap industrial cleaners for bi-carb, you have to scrub harder; when you set up five bins in the kitchen, garbage disposal becomes an hourly filing problem and, let's face it, it was nice having soft toilet paper.

True greens appreciate Kermit's lament - it's not easy being green. So, too, do women. "When charismatic green males start advising us to make our own soap, abandon our washing machines and hand wash cotton nappies in the hand-made soap, I don't think they mean all of us. I think they mean us women," Susan Ryan told a conference last year.

Although she's been a lone voice in the feminist movement, Ryan's sentiments are reflected in the figures that Kingsley Dunn, the marketing manager of Kimberley-Clark, monitored during 1989. "Frankly, our worst fears weren't realised," he says. "Sure, growth [of disposable-nappy sales] has levelled off, but our research indicates that that is not so much the environment but the recession and a return to old-fashioned ideas about mothering."

In the financial year ended last June, the number of nappy changes using disposable nappies grew from 36 per cent to 38 per cent. It confirmed Dunn's belief that "the people getting hysterical about disposable nappies weren't the people who were getting their hands dirty".

Paul Gilding, the executive director of Greenpeace, is not surprised that people are finding the string-bag lifestyle tough. "We spent 20 years convincing people we have a problem, and we have done that. Now we have to move on to making changes and that's the hard part.

"Within Greenpeace, we are only too aware that we have to go on to the next stage, too. We can't just keep yelling about chemicals pumping into rivers; we have to start talking about cleaner production methods."

The fact that organisations such as Greenpeace are relying on the talents of scientists rather than freelance demonstrators indicates the increasing complexity of the debate. Hugh Mackay points out that "in the fervour of 1989 there was a retreat to very simple slogans - developers are bad, plastics are atrocious, chemicals should be banned". Today the villains are not so obvious.

In deciding whether a product is more, or less, green than an alternative, the concerned consumer now has to conduct cradle-to-grave equations - which uses most resources, which uses unrenewable resources, which takes the most energy to make and which lasts the longest and is cleanest to dispose of?

Consumer confusion over what's green and what's not has been compounded by the marketing of both new green products and old products in a new green suit. Don Henry, director of the World Wide Fund for Nature, says, "In our tracking of supermarket shelves, we've found a great concern over how much 'green' labels can be trusted. Until we get confidence back into people's purchasing of green products, they won't do it."

Judging by the appearance of supermarkets, one would presume the environmental battle has been won. The colour has drained from packages - dun is good - and the shelves look like a zoo: dolphins, pandas and trees abound. But when the sceptical consumer looks beyond the green ticks that manufacturers have given their products, they are often disappointed.

Many detergents now boast they are biodegradable they've been biodegradable for more than a decade. Some point to a "potential for recycling" when technology for such recycling doesn't exist. Some stain removers proclaim they are free of CFCs when they always have been. And the Down to Earth brand says its laundry detergents are not tested on animals when, in fact, no laundry detergents are.

Such cynical marketing, which Greenpeace's Paul Gilding calls "bung a dolphin on the label and we'll be right", may have done more to undermine the green consumer than even the recession.

Samuel Taylor's marketing director, Ross Pearson, says the Down to Earth range reached phenomenal market shares of up to 15 per cent just after its launch early last year, but concedes that it has since dropped to half those shares and is unlikely to reach such heights again.

Although two products in the Down to Earth range have been reformulated and the promotions for the brand now stress they're "not yet perfect", the dolphin insignia has become the butt of the green grocery trade.

Roger Pugh, director of environmental marketing consultants Environmental Resources, says "The big news is not green products but how big brands have changed. As the major brands acquire environmental characteristics - whether honestly or otherwise - consumers have gone back to them.

"The specialist environmental products will have only niche positions because hard-core environmentalists, those who wash their shirts in homemade soap and clean the toilet with bi-carb and vinegar, represent only 1 to 2 per cent of the market."

While Gilding believes manufacturers are now beginning to make genuine efforts for the environment, he is concerned about consumers being lulled into a false sense of security with the dun packaging and "Won't harm the Milky Way" type promises of the major brands. Even Susan Ryan says "focusing a individual products is not terribly effective - you get people driving to the supermarket in their Volvos to buy dolphin-brand washing powder".

As environmentalism becomes blended into the routine marketing mix - in much the same way that Schweppes incorporated low-kilojoule products into its range in the early '80s fitness boom and Kellogg adopted oats in the cholesterol scare of the late '80s - then the green campaign may end up becoming a brand-switching exercise rather than a lifestyle changing event.

Susan Ryan, who is presiding over a much calmer plastics industry today, says, "I think the fact that the recession has brought more balance to the environmental debate is healthy for the movement because when you focus too narrowly on one issue, you get a backlash and there has been a backlash against the greens."

Hugh Mackay, too, queries the do-or-die tactics of 1989. "There's a consensus in activism that you have to go too far to show people the right way. Those over-the-top measures are applied by political, philosophical and religious groups. My own idea is that those tactics backfire; they end up leading to disappointment, cynicism and knee-jerk reactions. Evolution is much more effective than revolution."

World Wide Fund for Nature's Don Henry is aware of such cynicism and frustration. "If people don't have access to public transport, they can't ditch their cars. If there are no recycling factories, why should they put their papers out for recycling? If the corporate world is still spewing gases from their chimneys, it doesn't give people a lot of incentive to do the right thing."

Paul Gilding of Greenpeace sympathises with those green consumers who are still awaiting the arrival of a bi-carb sprinkle pack. "It was a giant con by industry and government to put the onus on the consumer. They knew that the consumer was an easy target. We think that while consumers do have a role, the responsibility must lie with govemment and industry.

"The sort of changes we need to make are not about changing toilet paper brands. It's about changing the way society is structured."

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