(Disk Change)

The issues are resource depletion, energy use, recycled, reduced waste, energy consumption. It is not a green and black world and Green Home will not be able to make that distinction. You can't aggregate indicators - you have to keep you arguments to the indicators themselves. Green Home needs to state what the issues are - it needs to state what we know about these products right now - it DOES NOT NEED TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM.

LB: If it is a legitimate substantiated claim with reasonable documentation, you can make that claim. Don't even consider listing a company that is not going to give you reasonable documentation. (MM agrees) but don't start drawing lines between 25% and 35% post consumer content.

JG / LC / MM: But we do have to draw that line.

LB: Then you are getting into the game everyone else has gotten into - if you carry every product with an environmental claim - by what criteria are you going to exclude products? (MM and SS support the point).

LC: We may carry a product that the manufacturer makes NO claims about - it just happens to be green - a reel lawnmower, a clothesline, etc.

LB: But we're talking about toilet paper - wherein it is a claims issue.

JG: No, one of the two 100% post-consumer TP brands he is talking about - the company will only say "made from recycled paper" on the label.

LC: Because they're afraid it is a negative.

SS: They think that because there is a psychological problem with the consumer purchasing the product (LMH agrees).

JG: Is Green Home catering to the psychologically problematic consumer?

SS: Yes - especially with toilet paper. (LMH agrees).

LC/JG: In this particular case (toilet paper) we have a measurable axis - we don't know the significance of that axis in terms of assessing the value of the product. We know two things we can talk about environmentally in terms of the product:

LB/LC/JG: These are the reasonable, measurable criteria for product selection axes - useful energy consumption information is too hard to get (at least at this point).

JG: If we have the product that offers all three - why would you go below that?

LB, SS, LC: Because people consider price, brand loyalty, and their own psychological comfort.

JG: He agrees with price and softness but not psychological comfort. What if the customer asks you for the 0% recycled, 0% post-consumer content item because Mom used it?

SS: It has to have at least AN environmental attribute

LC: We're already making a compromise to psychology by selling toilet paper when most of the world doesn't use it.

JG: The problem is in trying to create gray where there isn't any (toilet paper) which will leave you when there is (just about everywhere else - like cleaning products, for example) totally non-credible.

LB: You consider that for recycled content but not for the bleached or non-bleached aspects?

JG: The decision GreenCo. and Green Home have to make for the person who is not going to buy brown towels is to offer the next best alternative.

LC: So you are moving the bar yourself.

JG: He is not a purist - the rational choice is that if people won't buy the best environmental product, you give them the next best thing. But who, if given the choice between 60% and 100% post-consumer waste TP would buy the 60% unless it were cheaper (which it isn't), softer (which it isn't) or offers some other benefit. If there is no other benefit - why offer it to them?

LC: If a product was hugely popular - if it was being asked for by our customers and it was less perfect than the perfect environmental product but it was close - we would sell it…

LMH: (Agrees with LC) We are a superstore. She doesn't think John is considering the psychology of the common person. We are a superstore - we need a lot on the shelves, options. We cannot pretend to know what everybody wants.

SS: In a couple of years though, we will have really good information from tracking the consumers and then we can start raising the floor.

SUMMARY:
LC: (one version of the summary) We will only sell the greenest thing that we can - but there is no rule. We will sell something like the top three greenest products unless there is an important reason to sell something slightly less green (like popularity, quality, comfort, price familiarity).

LB: (another version of the summary) There are two proposals on the table that are not resolved:

1.	In a category where there has been sufficient research conducted, such as JG has been able to do through GreenCo. in this product category - we should only offer the best.
2.	(The alternative view - which Linda has) We, in this category, have not demonstrated that it is the best so that rather than state environmental preferability, we should:

a.	Identify the issues for the products
b	State the verified environmental attributes of the products that address those issues.
c.	And allow the consumer to make a choice.

MM: 50% post-consumer is the threshold and beyond that you lay out the attributes.

LC: It is too arbitrary to say that 100% is fine and 60% is not fine but that chlorine or not chlorine is fine. Those are decisions and value judgements that...

SS: (agrees) That only the consumer can make...

LB: (agrees)...If we make that decision, we're just becoming another filter that may be filtering out the right environmental choice ultimately because we don't have all the environmental facts.

JG: (does not buy the argument at all) It sounds like Linda is saying that if "I can't prove that my criteria are the only or the best criteria then I just offer basically anything".

LB: No - you would offer products that offer environmental attributes in those issue areas - that offer recycled content but not necessarily 100%, that offer elemental chlorine-free or TCF without being able to answer the question of whether one of those is better.

LC: So, if you are able to make a demonstrable claim in an issue area that distinguishes you from the pack in a green way then that's generally a product.

JG: But then you have to offer the whole universe from 25% to 100% post-consumer content.

LB: She thinks that Green Home would say "Some of the issues that have been identified for toilet paper are these: the issue of fiber that could be more appropriately used in an application that could be recycled rather than in an end-use product like toilet paper, the issues of bleaching and resulting toxicity to the environment or lack of bleaching as an option. The products listed below are products that have made some attempt to address these issues with varying levels of success." We'd offer unbleached, 100% recycled product, and then the bleached version of that product, then the 60% product. But there is no way to arbitrarily draw the line...

MM/SS: In the case of TP, the whole industry is 25%...

LB: Then we would NOT carry 25% because it represents "0".

JG: There is one manufacturer (Wisconsin Tissue) of unbleached consumer product but they stopped making toilet paper. It is also 100% post-consumer. All other brands are EFC - none are hydrogen peroxide-free and almost every product has SOME recycled content. You would then distinguish between pre-consumer and post-consumer.

LB: There are more distinctions of recycled paper. The post-industrial is also called pre-consumer but the category does not include industrial scrap which comes off the floor. There are some materials the E.P.A won't allow, there are some materials not allowable under ISO 14021, material SCS the Attorneys General won't allow, etc. yet the industry will call it recycled and get away with it.

JG: In the case of Chinet plates the issue for the Attorney's General is the amount of post-consumer waste…(the FDA will not allow post-consumer content).

(MM leaves)

LB: The issue of what's being defined as recycled is going to be applicable to a lot of categories: A lot of material that is being claimed to be recycled that doesn't meet traditional post-industrial recycled definitions.
Post consumer - is well understood
Post industrial - is not well understood.
There is a lot of gray and people are very confused around it. That is also the area around which industries are most likely to make claims about recycling when they don't have a recycling claims to make.

LC: Now we are only including those that have made claims.

LB: (In the case of recycled glass) But if you break glass on the line, pick the glass up and call it recycled (which people do) they're claiming 60 - 70% when, in fact that is just stuff that they would always have used as a part of basic plant efficiencies.

JG: But you can't use the word recycled by itself, if the post-consumer claim is not adequate (so say the E.P.A. and other agencies).

LB: We need to continue this conversation for many or all recycled content products. The EPA's draft of recycled guidelines had a differentiation between home scrap and post-industrial scrap. They never finalized those drafts because so much industry opposition. But their opinion at the time was that there should be a distinction. A portion of post-industrial scrap should NOT be counted as recycled because it was not part of the waste stream (it was being used anyway) and companies claimed it was all recycled.

JG: (Stated for the inclusion on these notes) The Canadian government defines these things differently.

(We decided to move on and come back to this.)

Dental Care (Issues)

(The next two items were spoken after disk 13 ended and placed here because they relate to dental care)

JG: The statistics about toothbrush waste were not good. What do we do about bad claims?

LC: We would probably clarify it and sell it.
--
LC: We were not going to sell personal care products...

LMH: If we do dental care, don't we have to do all kinds of other things?

JG: Why wouldn't you?

LMH: We define what Green was - we should define what home is. CG: Including your body...

LC: We did not want to bite off more than we could chew. The idea was that consumers start with food then they move into more general merchandise areas when they begin to go green. Over the past 7-8 years there has been double digit growth in organic food. Double digit growth in non-food green general merchandise has just started growing in double digits in the past 2 - 3 years. In the case of cleaning supplies, paper towels, etc, it has been 30 - 40 %. We picked green general merchandise because it was totally undeveloped and there was no trusted source in that area. Organics, personal care and nutrition are glutted. Once we had a policy for certifying green products in that area - leverage it out into the more glutted markets.

JG: In the personal care industry there are tons of claims but there is no arbiter. No one doing science, no one looking at the ingredients (as John has) and it is, largely, nasty stuff. No one is making those distinctions. Consumers are more concerned about what they put in their mouths than what they put in their washing machines.

LC: There IS no trusted source (for personal care) but there are hundreds of non-trusted sources with huge inventories and selections, at least three or four category killers are there - mothernature, greentree, more.com, etc. We can only get in once we are the cat killer in general merchandise. Then we can roll-in with something special, different and new like our ability to delineate.

JG: If the claim is to be a green superstore why not start simple and work out? - Explain that there are lots more coming.

LC: Most stores (Walmart included) don't do that. So is it worth going public with a less than total range of products?

SS: Without covering all the categories, you run the risk of losing a customer.

JG: It is a fake issue - you'll never have the total range of any products of anything at any time. We may just be not as good in one area as another.

LC: When we were trying to get a merchant account they asked if he was selling health-related products and were concerned because it seems shady. Green Merchandise was simpler - less controversial, safer, smaller, etc.

CG: To open up the website with categories under construction contradicts our claim to be an environmental superstore. Also, we have to consider what products sell on line - toothpaste and candles do, clothing may not because people want to fell them and see them up close.