Fast Company is offering more and more content about green business and themes of corporate responsibility. A current article by Melanie Warner, "P&G's Sustainability Intiatives -- Not So Sustainable," highlights the challenges Procter & Gamble faces in introducing environmentally responsible practices into its manufacturing and telling a credible marketing story. The writer interviews and spends time with Len Sauer, the company's Vice President of Global Sustainability.
"Much of his job is corporate-policy policing: making sure that P&G's many global divisions and myriad product units all approach sustainability the same way. At the time of my visit, in March, he had just finalized the definition of a 'sustainable innovation product'. The four-page document had taken Sauers the better part of three months to write and get approved. The pileup of boring generalities never actually says what a sustainable innovation might look like; when I ask Sauers for specifics, he demurs, citing competitive reasons."
Warner points out that P&G uses possibly carcinogenic or environmentally harmful substances banned elsewhere:
"'P&G is doing a good job of reducing its greenhouse gases', says Devra Lee Davis, director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh, 'but at the same time, it's using cosmetic ingredients like phthalates, where the evidence is growing that these chemicals could have a negative impact on our children and grandchildren.'
"Products such as Herbal Essences shampoo and Olay Complete Body Wash contain comparatively high levels of 1,4-dioxane, a chemical that has been characterized as a probable human carcinogen by the EPA and banned from personal-care products in the European Union. Sauers, who spent most of his time at P&G working on product safety before being appointed to his current job last January, says there's no need for P&G to change any of the ingredients in its shampoos, detergents, or air fresheners because the company has already done thorough safety assessments on all the chemicals it uses. 'I know for a fact that everything in our products is safe', he insists."
Note the synergy of environmental and health-related considerations. Warner, Davis, and possibly P&G itself are broadening the scope of green practice to more encompassing corporate responsibility, a movement that makes sense and could be highly confusing and challenging for green marketers. Without defending a company's potentially harmful activities, one might get the idea that expectations for what companies should be able and willing to do are running a little high. If you run a global manufacturing business on the scale of P&G, a company that might have a larger ecological "footprint" than some small countries, is it really possible to avoid environmental and social problems? Should we praise companies for even attempting to strike a balance between their own interests and those of the environment and society at large, or is the very idea of this balance preposterous, because it lets companies off the accountability hook?
The article does not get into questions of scale, leaving us alone to pursue those in a separate conversation. Commenting on smaller, fast-growing competitors having introduced "natural" ingredients in their cleaning products, Sauers makes a well-rehearsed point, which, taken to an extreme, would state that nature and the environment themselves are bad for us.
"Just because something says it's natural doesn't necessarily mean it's safe," Sauers argues. "Everything has the potential to be toxic at high enough levels."
Where, then, is the balance that keeps perspectives and activities in a healthy proportion and helps green marketers and their companies do good work without falling into a trap of universal relativism?
The P&G page on environmental responsibility exposes a visitor to the sort of vague statements that can't really even be properly classified as greenwashing, because they dissolve into thin air upon closer consideration.
"As one of the first companies in the world to actively study the environmental impact of high-volume ingredients in consumer products, we remain committed to improving the environmental quality of P&G products, packaging and operations around the world."
The company mentions that all product ingredients have to pass an environmental risk assessment before they receive clearance "for the market," but does not disclose testing guidelines or results. Stepping across to the environmental science department and the risk assessment content nested therein offers more general, high-level, noncommittal language that is meant to showcase best intentions without providing actual disclosure.
"As new product technologies are developed, a tiered process of risk assessment delivers increasingly accurate safety information. In this way, the Company directs more of its resources toward the product improvements that deliver the greatest benefits to consumers.
"In the early tiers of the process, tests are simple, conservative and relatively inexpensive. Many substances used in consumer products may be judged safe at the first tier of the process. If no definitive answer results, however, and the ingredient warrants further development, successive tiers of testing follow.
"In higher-tier testing, fate and effect testing methods are more sophisticated and realistic, and the level of uncertainty is reduced."
We'll have to keep looking. That balance has to be there somewhere—don't you think?
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