Throwing Rocks and Building Houses: Sustainability's Highwire Promises
It's easier to throw rocks at a glass house than it is to build one. The Honest Company's got a PR mess to clean up as the company denies claims by a Wall Street Journal report finding sworn off chemicals found in the company's laundry detergent. Is the company guilty of greenwashing or just overpromising and under delivering on their sustainability goals?
Today's heated social media with its viral elements makes spreading news, even wrong news, simple as pushing the share button. For today's company with a focus on sustainability, this makes the experimentation necessary to create a new and different product process more tentative given the frothiness of opinions and public recriminations for achieving half-steps or incremental progress towards sustainability goals.
It's easier to throw rocks at a glass house--sustainability's reach for transparency in today's overheated climate might not best suit the experimentation required to have us break out of old and reliable products and their claims (and their petrochemicals and other elements like VOC's that we're trying to eliminate from their makeup). Even though with our best efforts we might strive to create great products in doing so, it puts our reputations at risk while we're working on next level solutions. Creating in this environment makes the trial and error of building something new into the melee of public opinion where we've got a lot of bubbling up of opinions informed often by emotions, ideas about what should be and the thought that sustainability is a fully cooked idea that companies can easily take on.
The Honest Company rejects the Wall Street Journal report and it's findings about its laundry detergent. Regardless of if the WSJ's report is right or wrong, is the damage to the brand, the company's name and image hurt by the allegations? I believe so and the reputation repair has begun. But digging into this issue more deeply is a bigger question: is the half step the company took to eliminating a certain chemical from it's product ok while it's working on it's next level solutions? So many companies are developing new products trying to diverge from industrial era thinking and production models--still the public likes to applaude the winning product when its done, not see the half step while it's being made. Company efforts in developing new products and services might do better staying in stealth mode until they're able to set public expectations rather than respond to them.
