Going Green is a Marketing Ploy

Green is nothing more than a marketing ploy. I have a hard time believing that if going green for a company didn't get them a net gain of something (goodwill, marketing messages, net increase in profit, etc) they wouldn't do it.

The best example I have seen in sometime is that of Walmart. My wife went to Walmart today and the greeter handed her a 16 page pamphlet (see at the left).

While the assertion they make is good, namely, "Earth-friendly products won't save the Earth if they don't save people money" is something that I agree with, what I don't like is that they hide advertisement under the guise of helping the planet.

There are 8 sheets of paper. They hand it to everyone one of their patrons that enters the store... of which, they claim, according to the marketing piece, they have 200,000,000. So, based on my "million man" math, that means they are planning on passing out 1.6 Billion sheets of paper.

So, they are passing out 1.6 Billion sheets of paper to show how you can be environmentally friendly. Well, according to Laserfiche, 1 tree equals 8,500 pages of paper, so Walmart, in their effort to advertise how great they are at being environmentally friendly have resulted in the cost of over 188,000 trees. Not to mention the ink (which is often petroleum based), solvents for cleaning the ink, waste paper from the printing process (usually estimated at about 20% or more), delivery to the warehouses (gas used), delivery to the stores (more gas used). And after that, how many people do you think actually keep the document or recycle the document. A hefty percentage will simply end up in landfills.