Why the magazine’s green award is bogus.

This March, Good Housekeeping announced it would be getting in on the ongoing greenwashing of the American marketplace. The magazine is launching a “Green Seal” to coincide with the 100^th anniversary of its eponymous endorsement, which guarantees the quality of everything from yogurt to storm windows. Greenwashing is usually the art of scoring an environmental touchdown simply by moving the goalposts. But I’m referring to that term of art in, sorry, a meta way. With all the greenwashing plus legitimate attempts at green labeling, the word green is useless as a label of distinction. Corporations toss it around to claim they’re being good environmental stewards, consumers are numb to it, and the greenest companies tend not to tout it at all. And, as if the meaning of green weren’t hazy enough, this latest label comes from a magazine that has had a long, cozy, and conflicted relationship with its seal-holders and no plans to modify procedure for the new green label.

Good Housekeeping touts its original seal as a mark that consumers can look to for quality assurance. It offers shoppers a two-year warranty in case a product bearing the seal also bears a defect. It was actually a “Seal of Approval” until a court case forced Hearst, the magazine’s parent, to drop the "approval." But the cultural word association remains. Good Housekeeping, with a 2008 circulation of 4.6 million, runs a research institute where products are tested before they earn the seal. Though its influence is on the wane, there’s still a century of awareness behind the seal, which is why Hearst is on a campaign to tailor it for the next generation of young, affluent, and environmentally conscious consumers.

However, as the Times reported in 2006, the Good Housekeeping Seal has long been a pay-to-play proposition. To earn the seal, products must advertise in the magazine, and to advertise in the magazine, products must qualify for the seal*. When I reconfirmed the tit-for-tat, a Good Housekeeping spokesperson told me, in seemingly as arcane a way as possible, “There is no other magazine that offers this kind of assurance—we support our seal holders with this warranty for their consumers, and we ask that they support us in return.” The Times said Good Housekeeping advertisers typically must match the ad buys they make in competing magazines.

In the struggling magazine industry, this aggressive deal is at least partially insulating Good Housekeeping from the current downturn. (For the first half of 2009, ad pages are down 19 percent in Good Housekeeping from 2008; that’s around the middle of the pack for titles in its genre.) Later this year, when the first batch of Green Seal products is announced, they will be subject to the same advertising requirements as regular seal holders are.

Many magazines, it must be said, suggest that products reviewed in their pages would do well to advertise in them, but nowhere else attaches its own brand so closely to its advertisers’. Indeed, Consumer Reports, the nearest analogue, holds up its independence from manufacturers as its standard, specifically disallowing reviewed products to advertise its recommendations. Meanwhile, Good Houskeeping's advertisers make regular appearances in the magazine's editorial content: In one issue I reviewed, an article offered suggestions on how to lose weight by switching to lower calorie foods, complete with colorful thumbnail images of the products. Many of the same foods were advertised either in that issue or in proximate ones. Yet the article, laden with national name brands, curiously declined to identify a healthy honey mustard. Instead, a generic icon stuck out like a plain white T-shirt. Of course, I couldn’t find a honey mustard advertised among the soups, cold cuts, and cookies that happened to be recommended in the editorial. (UPDATE: After this article was published, a Good Housekeeping spokesperson said they recommend "products that we have evaluated and determined to be the best for the story. Whether or not they are advertisers or Seal holders does not impact that decision whatsoever.")

The regular Good Housekeeping Seal’s pay-for-play component is already troubling, but in terms of products, the magazine doesn’t claim (though it doesn’t exactly disclaim) to be performing a comprehensive survey a la Consumer Reports; it merely warranties those products that are advertised in its pages. But the Green Seal, by definition, is a different monster. While the regular seal only has to be a warranty against shoddiness, the Green Seal is an affirmation of environmental friendliness, at best a subjective standard, and at worst a shifting one.

This Slate article from 2007 details just how confusing the issue of “greenness” can be. In a controversial study cited in the article, lamb raised in New Zealand might actually be environmentally friendlier for an Englishman to eat than lamb raised in his backyard. Greenness is fraught with such paradoxes, which is why green labels have become so malleable in the hands of large corporations, as we reported in our enviro-scams article in April.

Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, explained the problem of labels in his examination of the USDA’s “organic” label program. Organic, first coined in the early 1970s by communal farmers using ancient agrarian practices, became a marketable buzzword in the 1980s, during a backlash against overprocessed foods. It was then that industrial farmers took an interest, pushing through major compromises in the USDA’s newly proposed organic labeling regulations. One organic pioneer who became a General Mills vice president (and to many organic farmers, a traitor) explained to Pollan that the compromises were necessary so products like frozen TV dinners could be certified USDA organic.

Besides showing how easily the standards behind a label can be distorted, the organic episode raises a philosophical question: Should processed TV dinners ever be labeled organic? What happens when standards fall so far that many consumers simply think the word organic means expensive? Should dish soaps or toilet bowl cleaners be labeled green? Can they possibly be?

Good Housekeeping has hired an environmental consulting firm, Brown & Wilmanns, to help answer those questions. Based in Santa Barbara, Calif., the firm’s principals have helped companies from Nike to Patagonia wrestle with questions of greenness on an industrial scale. But they are reticent in explaining how; Brown didn’t want to talk to me about Good Housekeeping, and he wouldn’t talk to Fast Company in detail about any of his other clients in a 2007 profile, either. In that article, a client praised Brown as not just developing standards but making sure they get implemented in “the political context of a corporation.” Green realpolitik aside, there are no political battles to fight at Good Housekeeping. Although Editor-in-Chief Rosemary Ellis claims to have a lot on the line, with the Green Seal, I’ll eat my recycled cotton hat if Good Housekeeping ever reports that one of its advertisers failed to earn a Green Seal—information of great interest to consumers that runs counter to the magazine’s finances. In fact, here’s one to watch for: Clorox GreenWorks, called out by The Big Money as an enviro-scam, already owns a regular Good Housekeeping Seal. Will it soon be upgraded to green?

Even though Brown wouldn’t talk to me about his work with Good Housekeeping, Joel Makower, author of Strategies for the Green Economy, wrote about Brown & Willmanns’ "environmental scorecard" in his book as a good model for green certification. But Makower also describes the 20-year quest for a universally accepted green seal as “long, arduous, and unsuccessful.” Dozens of efforts have failed or been marginal at best. Right now the most interesting attempt is Wal-Mart’s sustainability index consortium, behind which the retailer will throw its massive purchasing power. The index won’t necessarily bestow a seal, but it will invert the usual dual paradigms of either greenwashing (a la Windex’s self-bestowed approval) or trusting nonprofits that lack Wal-Mart’s leverage and resources to accurately and objectively bestow green certifications.

The problems the environmental movement has faced in creating a universal green seal make it worth asking whether green seals are necessary or even desirable. Recently at Wired magazine’s business conference, General Electric (GE) CEO Jeff Immelt told Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson about his company’s “Ecoimagination” greening effort, which addresses both the company’s products and its internal green strategy. Immelt says the company budgeted, “two or three hundred million dollars a year” for the internal side, which was a condition of receiving the World Resources Institute’s imprimatur on the initiative. “Turns out, [the internal greening effort] saved us five or six hundred million dollars over the last five years.” But when a surprised Anderson asked Immelt about GE’s adherence to the Kyoto standard, Immelt’s response was telling: GE didn’t “publicly” ratify it. People think green means expensive, he later explained. Shareholders don’t want to hear about it.

Immelt was speaking about a corporate greening effort, but Ecoimagination was designed to be a profitable undertaking on the consumer side as well. Immelt was initially averse to the program for the same reason. He thought internal greening would be an expense and not a savings; people think green means soft, but studies show they buy green because they think it’s hip, or they feel guilty. But Method, a company that pretty much invented stylish liquid soap and laundry detergent, wants consumers to get over their guilt.

Method once had a dirty little secret that has lessened somewhat with rising consumer awareness: All of its products are environmentally friendly. The only standard it adheres to is the EPA’s, and it doesn’t label its products with that program’s seal. It doesn’t want consumers weighing the seal in their minds when picking out soap. That’s because green has long signaled compromise either on price or on cleaning power. Green’s do-gooder vibe has always carried an aura of impracticality, and that’s something Method decided to fight, by not overtly branding its goods as “green.”

Co-founder Adam Lowry explained this strategy to Grist, saying he wants to make Method products “accessible both from a price-point standpoint and from a design/aesthetic standpoint to everyone else who isn't this sort of tree-hugging granola—forgive the expression. ... Why would you do all this green stuff and then just hang out with other greenies? That's one of the biggest reasons why the traditional environmental movement has not succeeded. It's not democratic.”

Lowry hits the problem with green labeling right on the head. Green labels perpetuate “guilt and absolution,” he says, instead of focusing attention on attributes that matter in the gut-instinct moment a shopper chooses which furniture polish to toss into his cart. Good Housekeeping’s Green Seal seems poised to perpetuate the authoritarian, exclusionary qualities that have stalled the environmental movement for two decades. When I asked Good Housekeeping about the criteria, for example, the spokesperson responded, “the criteria will be transparent to applicants,” ignoring my question of whether consumers will be told what exactly “green” means to Good Housekeeping.

The problems with Good Housekeeping’s Green Seal put Method’s seal-shunning into sharp relief. Any green-label program method uses can and will easily be co-opted by the competition. That’s why its products bear a seal of sorts that only claims to be natural and nontoxic, two terms with relatively immutable definitions. Competitors trying to move the goalposts will have a hard time borrowing those words without making real changes. Yet even though companies like GE and Method have proven sustainability efforts can be profitable and accessible, companies like General Mills and Proctor & Gamble retain a mindset that prevents them from seeing sustainability as a win-win, despite earning green labels in certain areas. Earning or appointing yourself a “green seal” represents an easy way out, while hiding the truth in a hollow phrase. So a green seal that can only be earned by companies advertising in Good Housekeeping is, as a means of comparison, unreliable, and at worst, completely so. With pay-to-play built right in, the Green Good Housekeeping Seal can only raise more questions about products than it will answer.

Indeed, Makower, when musing on what sort of green-seal model might work, specifically rejected Good Housekeeping’s, “because it’s a pay-to-play proposition.” Yet that’s exactly what Good Housekeeping has now proposed. And not for the first time either: The Times reported that the magazine first tried to jump on the bandwagon in 1990 by instituting “Good Earthkeeping” awards, an effort that seems to have gone nowhere. The same article happens to quote Joel Makower, who then called green “the feel-good issue of the decade,” (meaning the ‘90s). The article also notes that Makower went on a tour for an earlier book courtesy of the Fort Howard paper company, which he happened to write about favorably in that book. (Makower said he became involved with the company after the book was completed.)

So yes, it sounds convenient to have Good Housekeeping do our green labeling, Brown & Wilmanns do our green advising, and Joel Makower do our green advocating, but the fact of the matter is, green seals, no matter who stands behind them, are mere advertising—which, said Edgar Shoaff, is “the art of making whole lies out of half truths.” The real question, then, isn’t whether the green label on that bottle of bleach is a reliable one or a greenwash. It is: Why, knowing what we know about the impact of humanity on the world, do we continue to make products that cause the both of us harm?

Correction: An earlier version of this article reported that 'to advertise in the magazine, products must earn the seal.' Good Housekeeping has since clarified that all products advertised must pass the magazine's evaluations.