Justine Raymond

You’re out shopping at Wegmans when you notice 24-bottle cases of water are on sale. The packaging boasts a bright green label proudly proclaiming that each bottle contains 50 percent less plastic than the company’s previous model. Good for the environment, and affordable? Sold!

You still bought a 24-pack of plastic water bottles. When you’re done with them, odds are those water bottles will end up in a landfill all the same. Did you really make an environmentally-friendly choice? Or were you simply conned by yet another marketing ploy? If there’s one truth in all of economics, it’s that marketing can make you believe anything. And if someone thinks they can benefit or make a profit from deceiving you, they will do so without hesitation.

Take organic farming, for example. Pesticides and chemical fertilizer are nasty products, so organic food is grown without them. Less pesticides mean fewer toxins in the environment, and less chemical fertilizers means healthier land and water. The price to pay for this, however, is lower crop yield per unit of land. That’s why those organic bananas at the store cost twice as much as their-mass produced counterparts.

If it’s better for the environment, though, isn’t it better to buy organic food anyway? Not really. Bananas are bananas — they can only grow in tropical climates. Organic or not, bananas purchased at a store in Rochester were undoubtedly shipped there from halfway across the globe — burning excess fossil fuels and releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gas in the process. “Organic” never guarantees “local,” no matter what the product is. Even if an organic crop was grown on a farm in the U.S., odds are it was still shipped massive distances due to the excessive demand for organic food. But hey, if the product looks better than its traditionally-grown counterpart and its label tells you it’s better for you, odds are you will still buy it without a second thought.

Retail companies aren’t the only ones who will manipulate your thinking with bad data; environmental activists are also guilty of false marketing. The wind farm controversy is probably their most well-known failings. When birds fly near wind turbines, there is a possibility of death from impact. The number of bird deaths per turbine per year was estimated by a 2007 U.S. National Academy of Sciences study to be no more than .03, for a nationwide total of 40,000 birds per year. In contrast, cats were estimated to kill at least several million birds yearly. Still, the notion that wind power was harming some animals was enough to set activists off, leading to a smear campaign and a subsequently poor public opinion of wind farms. If future technology leads to the possibility of widespread clean energy through wind farms, people may be unwilling to support the program because of the misinformation they’ve been fed.

I’m not saying the green movement should be avoided — far from it, actually. Environmental problems are a reality, and it’s good to actually care about how clean the food, water and air that enters your body is. There are some genuinely “green” products out there, like phosphorus-free soap, but many proponents of the green movement have been taken advantage of by mass marketing and propaganda. If you choose to support a green cause or make a green lifestyle change, I only ask that you do so carefully. For every genuinely good cause out there, there are a dozen causes trying to spin it to their advantage. Don’t accept everything you hear or read. Check your facts twice, and make sure you’re getting reliable information so you don’t actually do the environment more harm than good.