Brown (and dirty) is the New Green

by Sharon McIver // October 12 2009

“We are as real as what we fake” Peaches, ‘Dark Horse’

Forget green, I’ve discovered the joy of brown – compost that is. I’m addicted to the ‘dark’ stuff, and A Glorious Gallery of Rot: Compost as Art would suggest I’m not the only one (lighterfootstep.com/2009/08/a-glorious-gallery-of-rot-compost-as-art/). Having clicked the link from the Green Party mail out, while it is opening I imagine what shape compost art might take, but these pics are by folks for whom composting is already an art form. The Gallery is a celebration of ‘green’ waste, which in fact, comes in a rainbow of colours. The photo of florist roses and baby’s breath dying atop a lovely mattress of garden brown is particularly fetching. Inspired, I go out and check my own.

After three months of trying to feed it something every day, my compost is roughly the size of a cubic metre, and on Saturday – after adding several old green recycling bins of cut back leaves and twigs – I covered it with a large piece of sacking and an old brown tarp. I was going to try and leave it until next Saturday before peeking under the blankets, but after plenty of rain, a fine, windy day provides the perfect opportunity to dry the covers. On the way to the bins, I collect some ‘windfall’ sticks and spend several minutes breaking them into the lovely pink camellia and white cherry blossom flavoured pile I’ve just started. I put the covers from the decomposing batch on the line, and almost forget to go back and check the masterpiece. I’m glad I did – what I find there provides the perfect inspiration for this column.

The top layer of borage leaves (an excellent composter) is still green and intact, but a few inches there is a whole other world. Brown and slimy and steaming like a fresh turd. This baby is cooking. Yaye – I can compost!

Which brings me back to green. Green was what sustainability used to be called, but the term has now been hijacked as a catch-all phrase to suggest that corporate princes have gone all Kermit the Frog. Be aware – green-washing is rife. Just because they’re loudly rebbiting on about how green they are, doesn’t mean that their ethics apply to 100% of their products. Take McDonalds. I have a magazine advertisement for McCafe that proudly displays the Rainforest Alliance Certified logo featuring a green frog (which conveniently lends my metaphor a more literal application). The copy tells me that it is the only coffee in New Zealand to carry the certification and directs me to www.mccafesustainablecoffee.com.

The website clarifies that “The Rainforest Alliance Certified™ seal guarantees that your coffee was grown on a farm where the environment is protected and workers are given access to better pay, education and medical care.” McCafe will never be my coffee, but I want to know what the difference is from Fair Trade. Under a FAQ tab I discover that the seal should not be confused with Fair Trade, and that the: “Rainforest Alliance focuses on how farms are managed. Fairtrade is more focused on tackling poverty and how crops are traded. In the end, both systems work towards the common objective of a sustainable livelihood for farmers.”

The website also provides a link to the big daddy McDonald’s site, and I hit it and search ‘sustainable’. Five items come up, each teaser talking about how McD’s is committed to sustainability. I decide against reading any of them because too much greenwashing can make you sick.

Instead I google ‘rainforest alliance fair trade’ and find a June 2009 article by Justin Trauben for the Organic Consumers Association about the difference between the two organisations (organicconsumers.org/articles/article_18372.cfm). It would seem that in the Rainforest also reside Kraft, Chiquita, and Wal-Mart. Comparisons are made in a number of areas, with Fair Trade clearly coming out on top, but Trauben notes that: “The most surprising element of RA standards, given their fundamentally weaker nature to begin, is that a purchaser’s product need only contain 30% certified content to be awarded the green frog label. Given all these percentages, a ‘non-critical’ criteria can be ignored, and final certified product could contain 30% materials that are 50% child labour free.”

It would seem that this particular Rainforest canopy is turning a slightly fake shade of green.

Comparisons aside, McDonalds is one of the fast food giants who have been linked to rainforest depletion for the production of soy products, so it’s only right that they should contribute towards protecting what’s left. However, if they really wanted to make their coffee as sustainable as their website address suggests, they would support Fair Trade. As for the rest of their non-McCafe products, McDonalds is hardly sustainable, or green.

For the past couple of months I’ve been preparing to teach a UC Community Education course on advertising. What this really means is that I lie on the couch watching television, taping adverts and cataloguing them in a salvaged exercise book. If it’s a programme I’m only vaguely interested in I flick through magazines looking for pages that I can magnify and dissect. What I’ve found is that McDonalds is not the only culprit – greenwashing is everywhere.

Having bought a stack of old mags and home-taped videos home from the Supershed the other day, I’ve realised that collecting adverts is another form of composting. One hundred less pages in the landfill, one hundred more power-point slides. They’re talking shit and they know it, and the more we sift through it, the better we can understand why our society is up to our ears.

No matter how green-washed your product, if it’s wrapped in white plastic, or even worse, Polystyrene (and why do the UCSA allow polystyrene takeaway vessels on campus?), it’s seriously de-greening our oceans. There’s nothing like justifying bad telly watching habits with a ‘sustainable’ purpose to stop you feeling guilty about watching afternoon telly. But the other day on Oprah’s Earth Day special, I hit gold, or more appropriately white – which is the colour of the plastic continent floating between California and Japan. The clip of the ‘white island’ – that is reportedly twice the size of Texas – showed underwater and aerial shots of the coagulation of weathered plastic, most of the chemical colours already leached into the ocean. Fabien Cousteau (grandson of the famous French ocean explorer) explained how it had happened, and indicated footage of plastic bags swinging from trees on the way to the shoreline, and smaller items being washed down drains. When they brought in the pictures of cute animals, the studio audience gasped appropriately at the slides of a bird encased in a plastic bag, a turtle whose shell had grown around the plastic band encasing it, and the more grotesque shot of a small landfill residing inside a dead albatross’ stomach.

From distressed critters to American landfills, Oprah covered a lot of bases, and I was relieved to see a woman at the end demonstrating new washable, recycled plastic lunchbox bags that could be bought on the Oprah website. I was concerned that the message would be focussed on recycling, but they did push going re-usable, and in one section also talked about using lemon, vinegar and baking soda to rid you house of dirt (.oprah.com/dated/oprahshow/oprahshow-20090422-earth-day).

Yet, at the top of Oprah’s Earth Day page, is an advertisement for Tide laundry cleaner. I click the link, and search biodegradable. One product apparently contains biodegradable soaps, and the company is proud to use recycled plastic for its bottles, but this is hardly a ‘green’ product. Chemicals – be it weed killer, toilet cleaner, or laundry liquid – are as bad for the earth as the plastic containers they come wrapped in, which are there to remind us that white is the colour of clean.

But what’s wrong with a bit of dirt? It’s not only where all the good germs that help build antibodies reside, it is the waste product that keeps us alive. We’re so paranoid about what comes out of the earth that we’re completely munting it in trying to avoid it. Then, when failed by our natural antibodies, we go to the doctor for antibiotics that further weaken our immune systems – and usually come packaged in non-recyclable plastic. The drugs themselves are pissed into waste-streams that are often treated with more chemicals and recycled into drinking water, which makes us want to by ‘natural’ spring water, bottled in plastic.

A turtle may be fooled into thinking that a piece of plastic is food, but it’s a long way from being as dumb as humans.

What we’ve lost sight of is that the earth provides its own cleaners – flies, worms, bacteria – all are employed in the task of breaking stuff down. In the case of soap nuts, the earth provides a cleaner in the most literal sense. Having recently inherited a washing machine, I didn’t want to buy expensive, plastic wrapped, biodegradable detergent so I went to one of the whole-food outlets in town and invested in a $20 calico bag of soap nuts. The paper label tied to the bag’s string tells me that: the 500g bag will wash up to 180 loads of laundry; that the nuts can also be used in the dishwasher; and can be processed into liquid soap.

I make the first wash a hot ‘dummy wash’ with baking soda and vinegar to clear out years of non-biodegradable powder build up, before opening the pack. Indeed, they look like nuts – brown, slightly sticky and according to the Soapnut Shop, sustainably harvested, wild crafted, biodegradable, and compostable. They have no discernable soapy smell and almost look good enough to eat (probably best to keep out of reach of children). I put six into the small calico bag provided, place it amongst my clothes, and set the machine to cold wash. Just before the final rinse, I remember to add half a cup of white vinegar to act as a fabric softener.

The label says that each nut can be used up to six times, and having used up the first lot, I’ve found my clothes are clean, and my woollies are softer than any detergent has ever made them. The nuts have lost their stickiness, and barely make a dent in the compost. Intrigued, I decide to find out exactly what they are and head to thesoapnutshop.co.nz. It turns out that the nuts are berries from the sapindus mukorossi tree growing wild in Northern India, and that one tree produces hundreds of kilos of berries each year, which are then gathered, sun dried, and deseeded. What is surprising is that The Soapnut Shop, believing that it’s important to “not only grow our own soapnuts for the future but to encourage you to do the same” also sells seedlings. I’m beginning to think this may be one of the most sustainable businesses I have supported, and I start to imagine what to do with a quality, unbleached calico bag. “Walnuts,” I think, before I realise that at my usual rate of washes (this is why having heaps of second-hand clothes is sustainable) I’ll have to wait for three walnut seasons before the bag’s empty. Damn – maybe I’ll give some away.

The Soap Nuts Shop is one of many small ethical businesses giving consumers proper sustainable options, but which, in the megalomaniac world of marketing, often slip under the radar. Yet, it’s worth tracking them down, trying them, and if you like what you find, telling everyone you know why this product is more sustainable than what you were using. Someone might challenge you on it – we all get fooled by green-washing sometimes – but at least you’ve tried to find a better solution, and like I did with the soap nuts, you may stumble across (proverbial) gold.

So here’s to the earthy colours of sustainability – save the bright colours for nature’s wrapping, and go brown.