"In somebody's mind, the products they were selling us were environmentally friendly," says Ron Jarvis, a Home Depot senior vice president who oversees the Eco Options program. But not in his mind. "Most of what you see today in the green movement is voodoo marketing. If they say their product makes the sky bluer and the grass greener, that's just not good enough."
By the standards of Jarvis--who fertilizes his own home garden with a liquefied worm waste product packaged in recycled soda bottles and fills his swimming pool with salt water to avoid putting chlorine into the environment--only 2,500 of the products made the cut.
Even at that number, some environmentalists say that Home Depot is being too inclusive. In the process, they say, it is engaging in its own kind of overstated marketing, posing as green even as it continues to sell powerful pesticides and polluting lawnmowers.
Green, after all, has become the new "new and improved," a label so widely used that many environmental groups, while lauding the heightened interest of consumers, now dismiss many of the efforts as greenwash.
Source: New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com