Last Saturday morning I was ”greenmailed” at my favourite health food store. The whole operation had Greenfarce’s prints all over it.
The enthusiastic young eco-warrior at the cash register announced triumphantly that the store’s bagging had gone “green”. She gave me the choice of either paying 5 cents each for the previously free disposable plastic grocery bags or 99 cents for their new re-usable, recyclable, environmentally-friendly bag. “And better still”, the check-out activist for an environmentally friendly society warned me, “by April the plastic bags will be like totally gone!”
Not wishing to appear to be an uncaring polluter of the planet in the presence of the assorted health nuts and tree huggers lined up behind me at the cash register, I gave in to the charming greenmailer and paid the 99 cents for the environmentally friendly ”green” bag. I could sense the collective approval of the lineup for my caring and consideration for the well-being of the planet until I drove away in my gas-guzzling 1987 BMW 535i restoration project, at which point my approval rating probably hit rock bottom.
Later that afternoon I was trying to trace the source of a chemical smell in the kitchen at home. Well guess what? It was coming from my new “environmentally friendly” shopping bag. A closer sniff confirmed that it was the thick layer of screen-printed green ink that was putting out the chemical stink.
I have been around plastisol screen printing ink for 20 years and could therefore tell right away that the ink was not plastisol. After taking the bag to the office on Monday and consulting with our experienced staff, we decided that it was either a thickly-applied solvent-based vinyl ink or perhaps a rubber ink. It doesn’t matter which, because neither are “environmentally friendly”. That made us take a closer look at the bag. The slogans printed along the bottom of the bag urged one, among other “green” slogans, to “support fair trade” , “act locally”, “reduce” and “reuse”.
I called the store’s head office and was eventually directed to the marketing manager who needed very little prompting to admit that the bags were made and printed in China. He said that unfortunately the ink was solvent or petroleum based because a more environmentally friendly ink, such as a soy based ink, did not print well enough on the woven recycled plastic bag. I should have asked if he understood the concept of “carbon footprint” and that the carbon footprint of his environmentally friendly Chinese bag could well exceed the carbon footprint of the old-fashioned flimsy plastic bags. It also slipped my mind to ask why then they did not use a natural fibre bag such as say cotton canvas and screen the green print in one of Wilflex’s environmentally friendly inks right here in Canada.
If you were the store management wouldn’t you have asked yourself a few key questions before leaping onto the “green” bandwagon? Is this bag an example of what “green” means? Are we turning ”green” into a farce? Does “support fair trade” mean exporting fair-wage local jobs to low-wage China or is that what ”act locally” means? Does “reduce” mean making “green” bags out of woven plastic and then printing on them with solvent or petroleum based ink? Does ”reuse” mean a non-renewable resource like plastic or should it be referring to renewable resources like cotton? You decide.
Nobody with even just half a brain can fail to see the benefits of going ”green”. ”Green” is a good thing. What is not a good thing is that the whole “green” movement seems to be in the process of being hijacked by a coalition of the ill-informed, the shrill and the opportunistic. They need to be come out in the open and be recognized as an organization. The organization needs a name. How about Greenfarce?
If you have any simliar stories or experiences with the “green” movement I would be happy to hear about them. Drop me a line at michael@screenflex.ca