Companies (not) going "green"

Call me jaded, but I'm getting hacked off at hotels' fake efforts at looking green when they're really just cheap. First it was the notes about "we care about the environment, please don't make us wash your towels", despite the fact that housekeeping replaces the towels regardless of what you do.

I'm at a Marriott now that has plastic glasses in the  bathroom, with a nice note saying that they're "made from corn, environmentally sustainable, and 100% compostable." Let's look at each of those claims.

• First, keep in mind that a real GLASS would have required no environmental cost after the initial manufacture, besides being run in a dishwasher with 100 other glasses. And there are no transportation costs after the first shipment of glasses, as opposed to the trucking cost of an unending supply of disposable cups.

• Making a plastic cup from corn creates artificially high costs for corn. At a time when we're having food riots around the world, we're using corn to make disposable cups. Our generation will live in infamy.

• It's not environmentally sustainable when compared to a glass. And corn is, in fact, NOT an environmentally sustainable crop. It requires more fertilizer, pesticides and energy to produce than other crops. And, um, it's food, folks, at a time when many countries are losing their ability to feed themselves due to climate change.

• It's compostABLE, which is not to be confused with compostED. This cup will go into the general trash flow, which means it will wind up with all the other garbage, and will in all likelihood NOT compost but, rather, will be there for archeologists to discover.

Oh yeah. Instead of a regular coffee maker, with those little paper packets of coffee, this one uses PLASTIC cartridges of coffee, thus generating more material that will never break down. How green can you get here, Marriott?

Thank you. I feel much better now. And yes, I flew to Baltimore from Denver, so my carbon footprint to get here is 1,013 pounds of CO2. The irony is not lost on me.

Comments

[~Kathy Dempsey]

I hear you, Mary Ellen. This practice is so pervasive that it has its own word now--Greenwashing (as I noted on my blog: http://themwordblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/earth-day-spin.html on Earth Day).
Disgusting, isn't it?!?

[Reva]

Excellent rant, mebs!

[Libray Betty]

I know I'm late for a comment, but I had to chime in.

I hear your concerns about the non-glass glasses -- it's not the best. On the other hand, there have been numerous media reports & investigations showing that hotel maids either don't clean the glasses or, worse, use the sponge that was used to clean everything else in the bathroom.

I guess using glass would be the green option. But it may also leave you a bit green too, depending on what is living in those tumblers.

[Becky Anderson]

Great post-- this is exactly what I was thinking last time I stayed in a hotel (except there's more depth and thought to your version). The "reuse your towels" thing just came across as sneaky to me. How often, again, do hotel bedspreads get washed? All that energy savings relieves my guilt for insisting on a clean towel every day.

The one that really gets me is the school cafeterias. Teachers do a good job teaching the kids about the environment, and it's a subject kids really care about. But every kid who buys lunch gets a disposable foam tray. It creates such a huge amount of waste. When I was a kid in this same county, we had plastic lunch trays. How hard is it to wash lunch trays? Isn't it a little silly to get the kids all worked up about Earth Day and recycling while teaching them to expect a 100%-throwaway lunch? Craziness.

[Monika]

Hey, I need to write an essay about fake "green" hotels and I would very much love to get the links to the weblogs you used, but I cannot find it in your blog.
Maybe you can help me with that?
Thanks and regards from Germany

[Mary Ellen Bates]

Monica, I'm not sure what links you're referring to. The one embedded link is to the specific Marriott hotel I was staying at. The rest of my rant was based on my own observations, what was currently being reported in the press, and what is available on the usual reference sites such as Wikipedia.

And as noted by Kathy Dempsey's comment, there's a word for this practice - greenwashing. You might want to search with that phrase too.

[Monika]

Ah, sorry, just noticed that I got it wrong ;) My fault. Yep, already looked for articles about greenwashing. Thanks!