The price tag of green

It is a sad consequence of our life in society that everything has a cost, if not in money maybe in time or in opportunities, as famously formulated in the adage "there is no such a thing as a free lunch". And there are many reasons for this fact that do not necessarily emanate from a manipulation attempt or the simple human evil. The fact is that most resources (such as food) require effort to be obtained and they generally only yield a certain amount. Once this amount is consumed, it is necessary to contribute additional effort to replenish it. So even if you get a lunch "for free", it does not come at a net cost zero, it is that someone has paid (or worked) for it and given it to you at a loss. The second aspect is that the social laws of reciprocity puts the recipient of a gift in the debt of the giver, even if this is not explicit and the response does not have to exactly match the value of the gift. Nobody likes giving away for free things for which they have had to work, so whoever gives you once a free meal is likely to come later asking for a favor. Finally, there is a kind of rule of transitivity, whereby you might not have to return the favor, but instead "pass it on" and give away something for free in response to the gift that you once got.

All this fumbling about giving and taking comes on occasion of a reflection I had about the so-called green products, where it is sometimes extremely hard to calculate the total price you are paying for using it instead of the conventional one and sometimes even the same applies to the intended ecological benefit of the product, which can be significant smaller than intended or even negative. As usual, I am not here with an answer, just with a question. What is the impact, for instance of using paper bags instead of plastic ones when shopping? The two obvious pros of the paper bag is that it comes from renewable materials (trees or used paper) instead of fossil ones (oil) and that it is bio-degradable so it will not float for decades if it lands at sea. However, there are also cons: paper bags are a lot heavier and bulkier than their plastic counterparts, so their transportation costs (and therefore their carbon footprint) is significantly higher per unit; it also happens that, because they are not water tight, cold and frozen products would typically need to be double-bagged when using paper bags, increasing the number of bags used per household and amplifying even further the overall impact of their transportation. Even so, probably the ecological impact of the plastics in the sea could be considered to offset their carbon contribution.

Photo: Marco Verch (CC BY 2.0)

There is however, a case, where this trade-off is even less clear and it is on household detergents. The problem with these products is that they have been developed for decades apparently without any regard for their ecological impact, but on the other side they have become really good at their actual function, which is cleaning. One could start to despise this approach straightaway or one could instead try to look beyond the concept of the evil corporation and look at their achievement from a distance. And when one looks in detail into laundry detergent one starts to find a number of finely tuned trade-off that certainly deserve praise: the detergent has to form enough foam to be able to clean, but not so much that it is impossible to rinse; it has to be chemically active but not so much that it burns through the clothes or in contact with the skin; it has to be light enough to transport and efficient enough to require moderate amounts, and so on. At any rate, it is much, much better than the old recipe of using ashes and glycerin soap.

When it comes to washing clothes it is relatively hard to establish a credible comparison between two soaps, since it is extremely unlikely that you have two loads to watch with similarly dirty clothes. However, the experience is much more direct when we talk about detergent for washing the dishes because, in the end, you use it with your hands and you can see in real time the quantity and quality of the suds you get, how helpful it is in cleaning the dishes and pots, and how often you have to grab for the bottle to pour some more. Recently, grasped in an explicable bout of trying new products we manage to buy a bottle of "green" detergent (not like the Fairy, which is actually green), which allegedly was less harmful for the environment and all I can say is that the experience was appalling. To start with, the scent had a surprisingly chemical hint for a purportedly "natural" product. The second negative impression was the watery consistency of the suds, that seemed not to cling to the sponge of the dishes and fall instead on the sink and run towards the drain. The result is that there seemed to be no way to give the dishes a proper soap. Finally, or perhaps for the same reason, the sponge appeared soap-less fairly frequently, so I kept pouring more and more detergent. It is entirely possible that I do the dishes in the wrong way, but it is indisputable that this detergent is not suited for the way I intended to use it.

This last point is rather important, because some times "green" products are not just a simple substitution for the conventional ones, but they required instead a certain change in the way we use them (consider the double-bagging mentioned above). Perhaps it is a matter of learning how to use this detergent the proper way, which might not be a huge effort individually, but when you gather all the households in your country the total effort starts to add up. At any rate, it is clear that many environmentally friendly products do not stand a chance against their conventional peers. If they were as good (for their price tag) or even better, people would buy them regardless of their commitment to environmentalism. The way things stand, environmentalists are willing to pay something (either in the form higher price or in a poorer performance of the product) for the environment's sake, but the rest of the people are not.

However, coming back to washing powders, there is a very relevant aspect that is often overlooked: even taking into account raw materials, production, distribution and the environmental impact after use, the biggest social cost of these detergents is the energy consumption linked to their use. According to some studies, washing in cold water instead of warm can lower the carbon footprint of one dose of detergent by nearly two thirds. And I have no proof, but I have a very strong intuition that conventional powders, with decades of research behind them, are going to perform better in cold water than those  who promise to be made without artificial chemicals. If we use ecologically-friendly detergents but have to wash twice as often or in warm water, we are probably paying more for the powder, getting our clothes less clean and, possibly, not even helping the environment at all.

I do not intend to have the answer to the question of when a green product is worth using it, but wanted instead to point out that quite often there are many hidden costs that can completely offset the benefit analysis, particularly in a time when making public display of activities that are regarded as environmentally friendly has become almost a matter of fashion. Of course, everyone is entitled to putting a price tag in the social recognition that one receives and be ready to pay a higher price to earn it. All I wanted to bring into question is what the purpose of our decision truly is and whether they actually serve that purpose or are just pure marketing. Have a nice week.