This is not a preachy post, but here’s the thing about any sentence that begins with a claim that the subject is not something – there’s a high probability it’s exactly that. For example,
I’m not a racist, but ______________.
I’m not being elitist, but _________.
This is not a preachy post, but ______.
There is no easy way to say this. Hugging the environment is not cheap and turns out, it costs your brand a lot of money to have a conscience. Take any packaging material, substrate, or ink, you will find that the eco-hurtly option is way cheaper, way easier to procure and way quicker to produce.
The supply chains will be in place, the margins will be wafer-thin, the volumes will justify the savings, and you will sucker-punch lovely Mother nature in the gut and move on with A/B testing your social media campaigns. Don’t get us wrong, we are not blaming anyone. All we are spelling out, is the way things seem – And perhaps understand why it is so hard to make the conscientious choice and to stick by it?
Sometimes, it’s not just corporate greed and apathy that keeps us from the truly sustainable choice. In a lot of cases, we just don’t trust our fellow humans to not be lazy.
Maybe we need to go to the coffee shop and get our own coffee, or if we want to stay put and have our coffee appear magically, then we pay a sustainability cess. You can either be lazy or cheap, you can’t be both.
Here’s a little fun thought experiment, we did in-house.
If you look at Pinterest there’s no dearth of amazing tree-hugging ideas. Where we seem to be failing is implementation of said amazing ideas and as a next-step, ensuring mass-adoption. So here, we take some of our favourite sustainable concepts, and punch holes into these pro-environment gems with an HHR (Hypothetical Hater Reaction). Needless to say, this is just a thought exercise, designed to make us think at this problem/opportunity harder.
1. The simple, ubiquitous cloth bag
Hypothetical Hater Reaction
“You can ask people to take a cloth bag when they go shopping, but what happens when you shop online.”
2. The compostable bag
Hypothetical Hater Reaction
“It’s 10x more expensive than the regular bag. I can’t afford the extra cost, and my customer doesn’t care.”
3. Cigarettes with seeds in the filters.
Hypothetical Hater Reaction
“That just sends out the wrong message, it feels like we are encouraging young people to smoke, besides only a cigarette brand can do that, and they are too scared of the backlash.”
4. The flower-fold salad box.
Hypothetical Hater Reaction
“Sure it works for salads, and gora food. But what about dal, roti, sabzi. But it doesn’t work in an Indian context.”
5. The edible cup by Lavazza.
Hypothetical Hater Reaction
“Yeah but it doesn’t work for deliveries, does it?”
6. Boxed water is better
The Carton Council runs a mail-in recycling program that you could use if your local recycler can’t handle this type of container.
Hypothetical Hater Reaction
“No one is actually going to mail these water boxes back to the supplier or the vendor. That’s too much of a cost to collect.”