It's Green...But Are You Sure?

In 1989, Mobil Oil Company introduced a new line of plastic trash bags called Hefty. A significant part of their advertising campaign, to both introduce the products and grow market share, was to call the trash can liners "degradable." According to the company, the liners had a special photodegradable

As the manufacturer described it, as soon as the bags were exposed to sun, wind or rain, they would begin degrading. But because most garbage in North America is taken from homes and facilities and buried in landfills relatively quickly, the bags were not exposed to the elements long enough to ever begin degrading. The bags did not degrade once buried and, because of this, the claim so enraged environmentalists that ultimately seven states sued the company claiming false advertising.

This situation has been repeated scores of times in the past 30 years by many companies. Manufacturers knowingly or unknowingly labeled their products green, biodegradable, environmentally-friendly and other terms, only to have it discovered years later that the statements were often not true.