Earth Day--Big Business Jumps on the Bandwagon

When a ragtag band of environmentalists kicked off Earth Day 20 years ago, it was as much a protest against “The Establishment” as an affirmation of environmental consciousness.

There were teach-ins and protest rallies. Sledgehammer-wielding students smashed gas-guzzling cars and buried them on campus to protest air pollution.

Organizers of that first mobilization could not have predicted that two decades later Earth Day 1990 would become one of the biggest marketing gimmicks since Burma Shave’s rhyming roadside signs.

“There’s a veritable feeding frenzy among corporations about what roles they will play on Earth Day,” said Joanna Hanes, senior vice president at Daniel J. Edelman Inc., a nationwide public relations firm.

From aerosol spray cans and plastic garbage bags to plant foods and disposable diapers, Big Business has jumped on the environmental bandwagon in a big way in anticipation of Earth Day.

A British airline is promising to plant a tree for every passenger who flies between Los Angeles and London in 1990 to reduce global warming and combat deforestation. The steel industry is extolling its product as “100% recyclable.”

A manufacturer of hair care products tells the press how it helped clean up damage from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. (Its shampoo was used on oil-covered sea otters). McDonalds restaurants prepares to launch a $100-million program --dubbed “Mac-Recycle, U.S.A”--to remodel its eateries and build new ones with recycled materials.

How did Earth Day move from street theater and hand-lettered picket signs to Madison Avenue in just 20 years? Is business truly concerned about a world in distress or is all the hoopla just another marketing strategy aimed at capitalizing on the latest rage?

Business leaders insist that their interest is genuine. They say their environmental activism is prompted by demands by consumers and stockholders alike for environmentally sound business practices and products. At the same time, by becoming involved, corporations build credibility and influence government policy, they believe.

Earth Day is providing them with an unrivaled opportunity to get the message across. The effort, however, is not without its skeptics.

Jeremy Rifkin, an environmental activist who heads the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, laughed when he recently opened his mail to find a pamphlet advertising a conference on how companies can change their image with “green lifestyling” and “green imagery.”

“Give me a break!” Rifkin said. “What’s happening is everyone’s moving into green. I don’t have a problem with that, but you’ve got to bear witness to the coming of the kingdom here. You’ve got to pay your dues.”

Christina L. Desser, executive director of Earth Day 1990, has similar complaints.

Desser rails against advertisements such as the one placed by an auto maker that depicted a snow-capped mountain peak and evergreen trees. Above the picture was a headline proclaiming 20 years of “environmental progress” since Earth Day 1970.

“The way they are marketing cars is every bit as obscene as using scantily clad females,” Desser fumed. “I think it’s going to backfire on these corporations that think a plain, green wrapper is going to turn them into an environmentalist in the public’s eye.”

Indeed, after protests from environmentalists, the Mobil Corp. last month decided to remove the word “degradable” from boxes of its Hefty plastic trash bags, conceding that it was irrelevant that a chemical added to the product causes it to break down in sunlight. Most of the bags wind up buried in landfills anyway.

In the last five years, 706 new “green products” have hit supermarket shelves, a rate 20 times higher than for all other new product introductions combined, according to Marketing Intelligence Service Ltd., a Naples, N.Y., product research firm. Most were organically grown foods and beverages, followed by products with biodegradable or photo-degradable contents or packaging, and detergents and cleaners with little or no phosphates.

“We are seeing so-called green products in just about every kind of product category,” the research firm’s president, Richard Lawrence, said.

A survey last July by the Michael Peters Group, a leading product and design consultant in New York, found that 77% of Americans say their buying habits are influenced by a company’s environmental reputation.

“I think we would ignore the figures at our peril,” said Simon Williams, president and chief executive officer of the Michael Peters Group.

Just last week, StarKist Seafood Co. announced it would no longer buy tuna caught with nets that also kill dolphins. The StarKist announcement was quickly matched by two competitors, Bumble Bee Seafoods and the Van Camp Seafood Co., which markets Chicken of the Sea. The three companies account for 75% of tuna eaten in the United States. The moves were widely hailed by environmental groups.

Also last week, Shell Oil Co. introduced the first reformulated premium unleaded gasoline, saying it would reduce carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons--one of the major ingredients of photochemical smog. Arco introduced a reformulated regular gasoline last year.

The oil companies are joining a veritable who’s who of American businesses--Colgate-Palmolive, Lever Brothers, 3M, Du Pont Co. and Proctor & Gamble among them-- who have rallied under the environmental banner.

“There are very good, solid business reasons why certain firms are going to want to be more cooperative with the environmental movement than they were in the ‘70s,” said Gary Miller, a professor of political economy at Washington University in St. Louis.

The reasons go far beyond marketing. Over the years, environmental regulations imposed on businesses have increased their costs dramatically. Businesses have been in the position of merely reacting to the initiatives by government and environmentalists.

Now, corporations say they want to become more involved in creating the laws.

“Is the environment important? I say yes, emphatically yes,” Kenneth Derr, chairman and chief executive officer of the Chevron Corp., told 300 employees in San Francisco last week.

“Compliance is no longer enough. We have to look ahead, anticipate change and anticipate problems,” Derr said. “It is clear the concept of integration of environmental planning is critical to the business planning process.”

Even before many companies jumped on the environmental bandwagon, the Chemical Manufacturing Assn. put a voluntary waste reduction program into effect. Later, when the federal government moved to impose waste reduction standards, it adopted many of the guidelines that had been created by the 177-company association in 1986. The federal standards took effect in January.

“We got ahead of the issue. We can comply with this law,” said Bryant Fischback, staff environmental consultant with the Dow Chemical Co. in Pittsburg, Calif.

More and more businesses also are learning how to avoid environmental problems before they occur.

Interest in developing crisis management skills--how to deal with a crisis and how to avoid it in the first place--has doubled over the last three years.

“It’s been very, very hot,” said crisis management expert Howard Marder, a senior vice president of Hill & Knowlton Inc., one of the world’s largest public relations firms.

“They don’t want to be considered polluters, people who are adding to the problems. . . . The burden on companies is tremendous in terms of their image, if nothing else, but also in terms of the way they are affected when people go to buy a product,” Marder said in a telephone interview from New York.

A poor public image can also be disturbing to investors.

Recently, for example, California Controller Gray Davis, one of the trustees for two California public employee pension funds, met with Exxon Chairman Lawrence G. Rawl to push for what Davis called sounder environmental policies.

Rawl had reason to listen. The two California public employee pension funds have a combined $86-billion investment portfolio, including Exxon stock.

But aside from the concerns over maximizing profits and keeping ahead of the regulators, some business leaders say they just want to do what’s right when it comes to the environment.

“There is a bottom-line profit-oriented argument for a lot of this, but I think if it weren’t for the fact that there are people in business firms that are sympathetic in the first place they wouldn’t be able to explore these kinds of actions,” economist Miller said.

That claim still may be a hard sell to some environmentalists.

“We can’t have this as a cosmetic movement,” said Arctic explorer and environmentalist Will Steger. “Everybody’s taking on the cause. But it can’t be a powder puff cosmetic. We as individuals and corporations have to take (environmental ethics) into our core. . . .”

Until that time arrives, Earth Day Executive Director Desser said, “Beware of the companies who have discovered that green is the color of corporate choice.”