Is P&G Really Future Friendly?

You might have seen this ad on TV lately: A girl, posing as a reporter with a camcorder, goes about her house and identifies “future friendly” products made by Proctor & Gamble, namely their Downy, Cascade, Bounty, and Tide brands. These products are proclaimed to be “future friendly” due to their decreased waste, energy use, and packaging. But are they really future friendly?

 

Individually, these initiatives to reduce waste, energy, and packaging are great, but the products themselves are far from being green (as a term “future friendly” would imply).

• Laundry detergents like Tide contain many toxic chemicals that are hazardous to the environment and to our health. 


• Fabric softeners like Downy are notorious for containing not-so-snuggly ingredients (like benzyl alcohol, limonene, ethyl acetate, pentane, chloroform, and more) that negatively impact the body through short and long-term use. 

  
  
• The quilted picker-upper Bounty paper towels may perhaps absorb better than others, but they’re still made from virgin fiber with no recycled content, and use a bleaching process to whiten the sheets. (For a good alternative, Grist.org has a great comparison between bounty and more “future friendly” brands)

  
  
• Dishwasher detergents like Cascade contain phosphates and chlorine. Phosphates can cause severe skin irritations, as well as harm to aquatic life. Chlorine bleach is harmful your health if handled or ingested, and can combine with carbon molecules to create organochlorines such as dioxin which is carcinogenic. (To see a list of detergents that contain phosphates and chlorine and some alternatives, see this article by naturemoms.com).

I would say that this is quite the greenwashing campaign put on by P&G; I just wish they put more effort into making their products truly future friendly.