Greenwashing or Honest Mistake?
The Misadventures of Supply Chain Management and Sustainability
It sounds like an old school company problem but the conflict comes between the Honest Company and their white labeling of Ecos Laundry detergent as their own. The Honest Company did independent testing prior to bringing on Ecos as their supplier and trusted the test results when they came up clean for SLS, the chemical ingredient identified as a skin irritant. After the deal was done, a competitor of Ecos lobbied a charge of false advertising claiming Ecos had used SLS. Soon after the claim, Ecos removed all traces of SLS from their website. Question is did they remove it from their product?
Another question is how should have the Honest Company behaved around verifying claims of its vendor partners? What is the power of the supplier versus the power of the buyer like the Honest Company?
You could extend these questions to a number of other incidents around suppliers-- think Takata airbags that showed up not only in Toyota cars but GM, Ford, BMW, Mazda, Nissan and a good majority of other automakers. How do we be responsible throughout the supply chain? And the next question is how do we manage customer expectations given that even with our best efforts, sometimes we still don't get it right? Interpretations of our actions as manufacturers and distributors of products span across the temperments of individuals who are commenting about public missteps and worse, reflected in companies that are outright deceptive (Volkswagon). Thinking that there's a completely sustainable solution using the tools of the take-make-waste manufacturing processes and the chemicals associated with them that we embraced during the Industrial Revolution misses the point-- Its up to us to find that "moonshot" that thing that wasn't possible before all of a sudden becomes possible to move from where we are to where we'd like to go-- the Sustainable Economy. When we can move to a new model, then we can move away from questions like "greenwashing vs honest mistake."
