BY STEPFANIE ROMINE | SROMINE@ENQUIRER.COM
According to a survey this year by Deloitte, 18 percent of consumers will buy more “eco-friendly” products this year than in previous years, and 17 percent will shop at green retailers.
That’s been a key to business growth for Cincinnati’s first green general store, Park + Vine.
The store opened this summer in Over-the-Rhine’s Gateway Quarter, and owner Dan Korman said foot traffic has picked up since the day after Thanksgiving.
“We have our regular customers, but then there was this whole new group of people including people we haven’t seen in a few months,” said Korman, whose store carries environmentally friendly and ecologically minded merchandise, much of it locally produced.
Korman says reusable water bottles and fabric gift bags by Wrapsacks have been hot sellers.
Customer Claire Goldstein of Clifton Heights bought her mother-in-law an aluminum water bottle by SIGG Switzerland USA.
“She does tai chi, and that will be really money saving for her,” said Goldstein, whose own family has given up bottled water and cut down on bottled drinks this year.
Goldstein, a 35-year-old French professor at Miami University, said she and her husband set a very low price threshold for Hanukkah each year.
She knows that sustainable and eco-friendly gifts – such as the wooden cars by Nest that she bought at Park + Vine and magnetic Öli Blocks that she purchased from the Blue Manatee Children’s Bookstore in Oakley – can sometimes cost more than plastic big-box toys. But she thinks about the effect products can have on the consumer – and the producer.
“Our consumer habits are polluting China, and I don’t want my gift to be doing that,” she said.
Goldstein said that this year, she realized that “the part of the (Hanukkah) story that we can focus on is the miracle of the oil” and make less into more.
A green year
Indeed, less-is-more has become a widespread mantra this year, starting with the Live Earth concert series and former vice president and environmental activist Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize.
Robert Lilienfeld, who in 1998 wrote the book “Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are” said big-box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Cincinnati-based consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble have helped raise awareness, too.
“They get what I’ve been saying for years: It’s all about reducing waste,” said Lilienfeld, whose Web site use-less-stuff.com offers 42 ways to reduce your “Holiday Wasteline.”
Through research and statistics, he found that from Thanksgiving to Christmas, Americans throw away 25 percent more than they do during the rest of the year.
By next year, all of P&G’s liquid detergents will be half the size and twice the strength, with up to 44 percent less water and at least 22 percent less packaging material.
Wal-Mart – which announced this year that by May 2008 it will only sell concentrated laundry detergents in its U.S. stores – is also an enormous albeit unlikely purveyor of green goods. In recent TV ads, the chain has been touting the effect of each of its 100 million customers buying an energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulb.
Of course light bulbs and laundry detergent don’t make great gifts. For the holiday season, Wal-Mart is offering everything from an exclusive and sustainably packaged Eagles’ “Long Road Out of Eden” CD to odor-fighting bamboo socks.
“We believe that consumers shouldn’t have to choose between products they can afford and environmentally friendly products,” said Matt Kistler, Wal-Mart’s senior vice president of sustainability.
That widespread appeal is a reason environmental awareness is reaching critical mass, said Finn McKenty, a strategist at Kaleidoscope, a product design and development company with an office in Downtown Cincinnati.
Kaleidoscope has recently unveiled The Greener Grass, a seven-part project that shares the company’s experts and resources with the public to initiate positive change “to design a better future.”
“You generally see that people become aware of these issues when they affect the middle-class consumers and their pocketbooks,” said McKenty.
In the last year, rising gas and heating costs, tainted pet food and toy recalls mean that the middle class is starting to “tangibly feel the impact of a lot of these issues,” he said.
Only the essentials
Aveda, which makes plant-based beauty products, is one company that has been focused on the environment for years, becoming the first beauty company to manufacture entirely with wind energy.
“The environment is incorporated into every business decision that we make,” said Gracia Walker, Aveda’s director of global communications.
The company has partnered with a village in Nepal to include renewably sourced Lokta paper in its eight holiday gift sets. Aveda established a fair-trade partnership with female artisans in the Bajhang region of Nepal, and the women’s paper comes from a shrub, so no trees are cut down.
The holiday gift for the staff will be a recycled, nonwoven polypropylene shopping bag from Get Hip Get Green filled with a compact fluorescent light, an eco-themed calendar and a blue spruce seedling in a tube that can be reused as a bird feeder.
“Our gifting has always been environmentally sound,” said Frederic J. Holzberger, founder of the Aveda Fredric’s Institutes in Hyde Park and Indianapolis.
That bag will also include a rechargeable gift card, instead of preselected products as in years past, he said. That way, Holzberger said, “they can buy as they choose” instead of accumulating products they might never use.
Such waste – of well-intentioned and quality gifts that just won’t be of use to the recipient – is a turnoff for Kristen Myers, a 28-year-old attorney who lives, works and shops downtown. She said that even if a sustainable or local gift costs a little more, it will be special.
Besides, she said, “as much as we waste on nonessential living, you could probably make cutbacks in other places.”
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