Proud to be P & G FREE
“There is probably already Tide in your laundry room. Charmin in your bathroom. Bounty in your kitchen.” So begins the recent USA Today story about the global expansion plans of corporate giant Procter & Gamble. Not satisfied that every person on the planet already spends an average of $12 a year on their products, P&G is planning to add a billion new customers by expanding its consumer product empire in the developing world.
P&G’s argument that any given product contains only low levels of toxic substances, such as heavy metals (SKII), 1,4-dioxane (Herbal Essences, Tide, Ivory Snow) sounds a bit lame when one considers the mind-boggling volume of P&G products sold worldwide — with 23 billion-dollar brands, and growing.
But hey, this is the type of business strategy the current economic order demands — not just steady profits, but ever-increasing shareholder returns (to send more $$ to the people who don’t need it). And to do it: convince more of us we need to buy more stuff that is made as cheaply as it can possibly be made.
My personal strategy for dealing is to spend zero dollars per year on P&G products. Try it, it feels great! But it’s not enough. As my good friend Annie Leonard, author of the NYT-bestselling book Story of Stuff, said at her recent book talk, it’s not enough to just be good green consumers. We need to make deep changes to the structures of society — by organizing, taking political action, putting our money and energy toward creating the world we want to live in. By building new economic and political structures that are compatible with life and healthy for people and the planet.
So if there’s Tide in your laundry room and Bounty in your kitchen, think about taking the “P&G Free” pledge, and check out Annie’s book for more ideas about how to get involved in creating a new story for a healthy, sane future.
Stacy Malkan, 3/19/10
March 19th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
My personal strategy follows yours exactly…I will buy $0 of P&G products (as I have done for many years) now and into the very distant future, until one day when we’ll look around and find that all the natural products ran those chemically infilltrated ones out of extinction.
March 20th, 2010 at 5:30 am
Stacy,
Informative post, thanks! Cedar Retweeeted for all of her petsgonegreen friends to read. As you know our crusade is to make sure pets are safe too! Paws up to people, kids and pets! Live Greener, Live Healthier and Bark about It!
Our education continues!
Cedar Dog and her transcriber, Kathy Deitsch
March 20th, 2010 at 9:38 am
I gave up on P&G a long time ago.
March 20th, 2010 at 9:39 am
I have always been Proud to be P&G FREE
March 23rd, 2010 at 10:50 pm
Me too.
April 6th, 2010 at 10:33 am
I work for P&G. As an environmentalist and ‘awake’ human, it has been a hard place to stay. Yet I can not ‘hate’ my Procter colleagues. I can only love them and have compassion for them. They are simply supporting their families and they believe they are doing good. I do not have to ‘agree’ with everything P&G offers, nor do I have to purchase it. But that is fodder for another discussion.
I applaud those who think outside of the box and look at the larger picture of our consumption patterns. As conscious consumers, our tone so often resounds of complete revolution, however. And perhaps our perspective should be more akin to ‘evolution’. After all, P&G’s mandate is to ‘improve the lives of consumers worldwide’. They serve the masses, bottom line, and they give them what they perceive they are asking for. The definition of ‘improvement’ is clearly up for debate, true, but the reality is that companies like Procter give people what they think they want. If the masses dramatically change their desires, P&G will change what they offer. So while people like those who input to this blog are the minority now, they may make up the majority in the near future – as climate change and the global water crisis become more apparent to the average man and woman.
So I sincerely hope that the ‘consumers’ who’s lives P&G is hoping to ‘improve’ will wake up and take their power back. As the masses, it’s our job to wake up and start taking responsibility for our habits. And be assured: as our voices increase in number, the Procters of the world will listen. We hold the one thing these companies desire – dollars.
And, after having been employed here and having witnessed the incredible brain power that exists within this organization, it seems to me that a company with the size and influence of P&G could be a great force to SAVE the world, vs. destroy it. So it remains my fervent prayer that big business will EVOLVE and gradually ‘get it’, choosing to make changes that are right for people and the planet. Either because of the personal ethics of the people who run them (they are just people, after all… and no amount of money will keep them from considering their grandchildren, when the sh-t really starts to hit the fan), the governments who regulate them, or the masses who vote with their dollars.
I’m publishing this post from work, from my P&G computer. I hope that HR finds it and reads it. lol.
April 8th, 2010 at 6:27 am
[...] the mind-boggling volume of P&G products—and their plans to add a billion new customers in the developing world—cleaning up these problems would go a long way toward reducing the [...]
April 9th, 2010 at 12:00 pm
S. Sharma,
I love your comment, and applaud your courage in posting it — from your P&G desk no less! You raise a very important and hopeful perspective. I agree that corporations are full of good people who believe they are doing the right thing, and that big businesses (and all of us) are evolving rapidly. These thoughts help me get up in the morning!
I am not so confident, however, that mega-corporations will be able to save the world – or will even be able to have a net positive effect – as long as the system remains as it is, with the corporate structure valuing shareholder profit above all else, demanding ever-expanding growth and allowing externalized costs. It’s like the movie The Corporation says, the result is a psychopathic entity, even if the people inside are loving and compassionate.
What do others think: Can corporations full of good people save the world? Or do good people need to be freed from the bondage of corporations?
May 3rd, 2010 at 12:05 am
Yes the levels of toxins could be low but like you said everyone has the products in their homes and when you combine them it becomes vey high levels of toxins. Sad but true. Thanks for the info!
July 19th, 2010 at 9:27 am
S Sharma, you write: “If the masses dramatically change their desires, P&G will change what they offer.” Do you really find that to be true? My experience has been that the masses are too easily swayed. They will buy what is cool on the spur of the moment, because a celebrity endorsed it, because a friend or classmate recommended it. If P&G, like Physicians Formula, came out with a verifiable all organic product line, hired top green super models to represent it, I guarantee you the masses would flock to it like they do everything else P&G’s gigantic PR machine has been able to sell over the years. It’s really a question of the chicken or the egg. And in this case I think the egg has to come first, otherwise P&G will just keep losing market share to small green upstarts with a lot more savvy. And perhaps, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if it wasn’t for the fact that P&G is so huge, they can never be displaced. The change has to come from the outside and the inside simultaneously.
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nice article, definitely.
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