Face it…green is nothing more than a feel good marketing tool!
It would be great if everything could be green, but realistically our industry is not built for conservation. From crazy showers and tubs wasting water to resources being taken from the earth to produce cabinets to cabinet knobs to human resources it is impossible to be “green”. That being said you can “manufacture responsibly for the environment. This is something that Europeans understood years ago. Almost every European factory you walk into will be ISO 14001 certified at a minimum. This does not mean they do not use resources it means they re-use them. It means they dispose of the waste in a proper manner and abiding by laws and standards. By the way… that comes as a cost in the form of money (which is part of the justification in consumer pricing of European products). When we as a society demand cheap products we as a society pay for it, in the form of the environment! In order to produce cheaper products you need to cut corners. You need to get rid of your waste by dumping not by disposing or recycling. You need to exploit your labor force and again cut corners, like basic human rights!
By no means am I suggesting everything from China, India or any other manufacturing giant is bad for the environment, but the odds are much better. We can all do a better job for the world if we looked in our back yards or our neighbor’s back yards for what we need instead of sourcing from the suppliers who are out to make as much as they can before they destroy the world.
It would be great if everything could be green, but realistically our industry is not built for conservation. From crazy showers and tubs wasting water to resources being taken from the earth to produce cabinets to cabinet knobs to human resources it is impossible to be “green”. That being said you can “manufacture responsibly for the environment. This is something that Europeans understood years ago. Almost every European factory you walk into will be ISO 14001 certified at a minimum. This does not mean they do not use resources it means they re-use them. It means they dispose of the waste in a proper manner and abiding by laws and standards. By the way… that comes as a cost in the form of money (which is part of the justification in consumer pricing of European products). When we as a society demand cheap products we as a society pay for it, in the form of the environment! In order to produce cheaper products you need to cut corners. You need to get rid of your waste by dumping not by disposing or recycling. You need to exploit your labor force and again cut corners, like basic human rights!
By no means am I suggesting everything from China, India or any other manufacturing giant is bad for the environment, but the odds are much better. We can all do a better job for the world if we looked in our back yards or our neighbor’s back yards for what we need instead of sourcing from the suppliers who are out to make as much as they can before they destroy the world.
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