Jay Bolus is a leader at MBDC, and a frequent collaborator with our William McDonough + Partner design teams.
After recently attending NeoCon, here’s an excerpt from his Greenbiz.com post about “Why Green Marketing Should Go Beyond Description by Omission”–
I recently returned from NeoCon, North America’s largest design exposition and conference for commercial interiors. While this expo is not particularly focused on sustainability, I was disappointed that so few companies had made sustainability a priority in the designs of their new interiors products this year. For those who did address the sustainability of their products, the common theme this year seemed to center around indoor air quality.
On the one hand, I was delighted to see company after company touting reductions in harmful gases being emitted from their products, but I became increasingly concerned with how much was left unsaid.
While product messaging was clearly focused on health and well-being, gone was the previous year’s more comprehensive focus on sustainability and product ingredients that are additively good for the environment. In its place I saw a preponderance of claims such as “PVC-free.” One has to wonder, when you can only talk about what’s coming out of your product, should we worry about what really is in your product?
To see the full post, click here.