Home Depot: Making an effort (well, kind of)

“Home Depot: Ripping the Head off ‘Green’ and Spitting Down Its Neck.” Or at least that is what Home Depot seems to be doing with their new initiative Eco Options Marketing Campaign. Well, that was initially how I started this post off, before really reading through the article.

Quick test: which is the Eco-Friendly product? A wood-handled paintbrush or a plastic-panel paintbrush? Either way you answer, you are right!

Okay, so maybe I am being a little harsh- “At Home Depot, How Green Is That Chainsaw?” (posted earlier this week) is an article that discusses Home Depot’s new Eco-Friendly marketing push which includes over 2,000 of the products they sell.

With the recent push of Green products and Green labeling (the Times refers to it as the “new and improved”) Home Depot approached suppliers of the 176,000 products they sell and asked them which products should be considered for their new Eco-Friendly marketing campaign. They received over 60,000 products that suppliers claimed were Eco-Friendly. The range of what made something Eco-Friendly is a bit questionable, though. Recyclable packaging: Eco-Friendly. Uses Electricity instead of gas: Eco-Friendly. And on and on.

Fortunately, Home Depot took the time to go through the list and narrow the selection down to a mere 2,500 products. Their goal is to have over 6,000 Eco-Friendly products.

So, yeah, when I wrote the headline, I had only skimmed the article and was a bit heated. Now that I have read it, I think maybe I overreacted a bit, but hey, it’s catchy and attention grabbing so it stays.

Home Depot is making an effort. They are rejecting a lot of the 60,000 rejected products from their Eco-Friendly classification and then going back to companies that have products that Home Depot thinks have some potential to be green and asking the companies to make some changes. For the companies the incentive is that the Eco-Friendly products have seen a 10% growth in sales over the past 3 months.

Although Green is still an unregulated term, Home Depot is working with companies like Scientific Certification Systems and using some of the stricter rulings by States to determine if a product truly should be in the Eco-Friendly market. In considering a certain corn-based rug as opposed to a nylon-based rug they considered the environmental impact of corn farming on the Gulf of Mexico from runoff. They are also checking claims with the Environmental Protection Agency.

It seems like with Home Depot, they are making an effort to publicize and push products that are more environmentally friendly, and raising consumers consciousness about the products. They are setting standards and following them through. Though the extent to which they consider products Eco-Friendly could be limited a bit, they are trying. Of course, at the same time, we need to keep in mind that this is also a marketing initiative, meant to drive sales and give the Home Depot a better, greener image. Plus, with no one policing stores, there are also some bizarre outcomes: “Urvashi Rangan, a senior environmental health scientist at Consumer Reports, complained of one store where Eco Options signs were placed haphazardly around toxic bee and hornet insecticides.”

So, it’s a toss up. B for the thought of it, C- on the follow-through. Better policing, fewer products and a bit more truth in their marketing could only serve them well.

P.S.- This makes post 300! Apparently this is only 298, not sure how I messed that up