ME Green & Sustainable Finance Series – How Green is Green?

Words like green buildings, green vehicles, green textiles, and more of this kind have been buzzing for a while… but are they all really green? The first thing that would strike most of us when we hear the word green is ‘eco-friendly’. So, for a product or a service to be green, is it just the end product that needs to be eco-friendly, or should the entire process of manufacture and the inputs that go into the making of the product/service also be eco-friendly?

In my opinion, for a product or service to be green, the input, manufacturing process, and output should also be eco-friendly. If the end product/service alone is eco-friendly but the process is not, then in my opinion, it wouldn’t be fair to tag such products/services as green.

This is where the different shades of green businesses would come into the picture.

So, how can one identify which product is eco-friendly? Let’s decode this question with the help of an example. Let’s say you go to a store to buy a liquid floor cleaner, and you come across a bottle with the tag ‘eco-friendly’. Will that product, according to you, be an eco-friendly product?

It may or may not be one. So how do we identify?

If we take the case of India, in the year 1991, the government had launched an eco-labelling scheme called the eco-mark scheme to help us identify if a product is eco-friendly or not, but this mark is applicable only to certain product categories.

Similarly, India Organic, GOTS are a few other labels used for certain other product categories to identify eco-friendly products. The Boo Boo Club (GOTS certification), Plum (PETA Certified), Brown Living are examples of brands that support sustainability by selling sustainable, eco-friendly products.

So, the next time we shop for products, let’s be on the lookout for products certified as eco-friendly to support sustainable businesses. In most cases, eco-friendly products come at an additional cost, which could be intimidating to a lot of us, but as the Cree Indians once said, ‘Only when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, will you realize that you cannot eat money.’
So, a small change in our shopping habits, when followed by many of us, can bring about a great amount of change in protecting our environment. As Howard Zinn, the American historian, once said, ‘We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.’

So, let’s not wait for others to bring about this change because ‘The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.’ – Robert Swan”