Economics Have “Tipped” in Favor of Green Products
High energy costs translate into higher manufacturing costs, leading more companies into saving money by buying and selling products made with recycled materials. There’s now a real price difference between recycled products and those made with more fossil fuel content, The Wall Street Journal reports. And the price advantage is on the side of the green product.
“When there is instability in prices, consumers tend to be open to new sourcing,” says Jeff Mendelsohn, founder and CEO of New Leaf Paper. A mill working with New Leaf uses recycled landfill methane as a power source, which makes its paper less expensive.
Buying green used to mean paying a premium, and customers would have to decide whether to be environmentally responsible or financially responsible. That’s no longer the case. Now green products cost the same or less than manufactured products made with fossil fuels.
TerraCycle, which makes fertilizer from worm castings, plans to market an artificial fire log this winter made from soy wax. Its main competition makes a petroleum-based log. Since the company’s raw materials aren’t linked to petroleum products, its costs aren’t going up.
As of June 17th 2011 we have upgraded our comment system to use Facebook comments. The below comments are closed and are listed for historical purposes.
Worm Fertilizer
posted on December 4th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Worm castings make an excellent fertilizer. The fact that it is sustainable because the worms are processing an endless supply of organic materials, makes using worm castings fertilizer over petro-based fertilzers a no-brainer. The upside to the current economic downturn and rising oil prices: we’re being pushed into considering alternative ways of doing things that will be of great benefit to the planet.