Green by association or 'green' marketing - fact or fiction
in Comment, Environment
As a committed environmentalist and passionate advocate for wood, it is the genuine green credentials of the material that inspire me. But it also clearly inspires the marketing gurus of other industries as well. An increasing number of non wood products are using totally unrelated images of forests or trees to evoke that warm and cuddly environmentally friendly feeling regardless of whether the product is really green or not. An advert for a well known tile company is doing the rounds at the moment - no picture of any products just a big image of lovely leafy forest track and even the sun is shining, what could be more perfect! I am not an expert on concrete production and processing but I don’t need to be to know that it must be a hard sell to present it as the greenest material around, but this industry has clearly risen to the challenge. Its official - you can now get "green" concrete and if you think that stretches the imagination, a recent advert for the Surface Design Show in London highlights intelligent concrete that can now absorb carbon dioxide. Whatever next you might wonder, "renewable" concrete would be my guess! Just to add insult to injury a presentation at the Surfaces show last week finished with an image of a block of concrete with a large imprint of a single maple leaf embedded in it! Perhaps we should take all our lovely renewable and sustainable cherry and oak and crush it all up into slabs and paint it grey!