For the last year I have been working on creating a new brand for Baumgarten’s to offer consumers products that perform better and make more sense for the environment than other products on the shelf, called simply and clearly CONSERVE.
Last year we launched a range of disposable dish ware made from sugar cane and disposable cutlery made from corn starch. These materials and processes offer an interesting alternative to paper and plastic respectively. They are relatively new technologies versus their more harmful alternatives and as such are very much still in their early stages of development.
Their characteristics are not at the level that you could use them in all applications, but they meet the requirements of these simple disposables easily and have far less impact on the environment as both are annually renewable resources that replace trees – at about 20-25 years to produce and oil for plastics at a few million years!
In addition to their benefits on the resource side of the equation, these products have the real added benefit that they are also compostable and biodegradable which means that they return to the natural biosphere to add nutrients to the soil in roughly 6 weeks.
It is possible to find alternatives to the present way that we produce products; the problem comes with the cost. For these 2 technologies at least there is nowhere near cost parity between them and their non-environmentally friendly alternatives. We are looking at a cost premium of roughly 3x still and even at that price we are still able to find customers that will buy, but the volumes are substantially below normal non-environmentally friendly products. Most of the market research I have seen points to a premium of roughly 10-15% being the level that a consumer says they are willing to pay for environmental friendliness.
As the recession hit its full stride in October last year I feared that we would see the business communities interest in environmental friendliness wane as it has in the past 3-4 cycles of environmental enthusiasm, but much to my surprise we are still finding that environmentalism is high on business peoples agenda with a number of companies mandating that their supplies purchases need to become more environmentally friendly. I think this time the issue has indeed created enough attention to have become a more normal requirement. This represents a real breakthrough in thinking and gives me great hope for developing the brand and environmentally friendly alternatives in the next year or two. Watch this space in June as we are about to announce the launch of a real game changing product in the cleaning category!
Have you identified the environmentally friendly technology that can replace your present technology?