Fuzzy clean, fuzzy green

Excerpt

Quarter of a century ago, an academic stalwart asked me why, as a matter of rhetoric, for products or processes we used the adjective “clean”, but not “cleaner”? The point was immediately conceded, but the question pointed to a fundamentally uncritical affinity that researchers in the environmental fields exhibit for absolute descriptors such as clean, green, and now, sustainable. In reality, we mean cleaner when we say clean, and more sustainable when we say sustainable. The science of metrology can be applied to tease out quantitative values of certain important attributes of products or technologies. These values necessarily place claims of cleanliness on comparative platforms. The metrics used to support claims, however, is rarely transparent. A company called Terra choice¹ examined 4744 home and family products in 2010 and found that only 4.5% of the entries are “sin free”, i.e. the cleanliness claims were factually justified. The rest of the claims were false or misleading. There are various reasons why these claims are often misleading. An educated guess is that in the main, the temptation to gain an immediate market advantage caused by a cleanliness claim outweighs the ethical need to subject the claim to costly validation. Another possible reason is that there is little consequence of false advertisement, and that since there will be others engaged in inaccurate advertisement, why restrain your own business? In business and news media literature, the words “green”, “clean”, and “sustainable” are as pliable as they are in science and engineering literature. The spectrum of variations remains unquantified, unarticulated, and ignored. …