Our Green Report Card

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a tourist destination. It takes a solid week of sailing from the West Coast to get there, and most vessels avoid it entirely because it's essentially a whirlpool of strong ocean currents. And it's a topic I'd like to avoid even knowing about -- one of those "I wish I could stick my head in the sand" stories that make you feel really guilty for being a human, an American, a consumer, and so on. One of those, "Oops, we really have irreversibly ruined the earth" kind of stories.

The Pacific Garbage Patch is an enormous hunk of man-made debris in the North Pacific. This trash swirls in a circulating pattern called the North Pacific Gyre, created from four ocean currents that combine to create a massive swirling vortex. It's estimated that 20% of the trash came from sailing vessels, while 80% came from land-based sources.

Scientists estimate the size of "garbage island" to be anywhere from twice that of Texas to twice that of the continental U.S. And just in case knowing a patch of trash is floating in the ocean -- killing wildlife and polluting the water -- wasn't enough to trouble you, there's this lovely piece of news: the decomposing toxic materials (mainly plastics) are slowly working their way back into the food chain. As Thomas Morton writes on the Vice Magazine website:

"Once the plastic confetti gets small enough to fit inside a jellyfish's mouth, it gets sucked in and starts its way up the food chain back to us. As the jellies float out of the debris field, little fish eat them, absorbing all the built-up plastics. Then big fish eat a bunch of little fish, even bigger fish eat a bunch of big fish, and by the time you get to the point where we're hoisting creatures out and eating them, you're looking at entire milk crates' worth of particles built up in their fat. It's the cycle of life reimagined as a dystopian sci-fi cliché. We are eating our own refuse."

So what does this mean for us as consumers, us as researchers, and our clients? It means we should be concerned about where our goods come from, how they're disposed of, and which companies provide the most environmentally friendly products and services. And as the green movement gains ground, more and more companies are starting to pay attention to consumers' concerns about "green-ness."

In this light, The Taylor Group has conducted its second wave of the Green Report Card -- our survey on consumer perceptions of corporate greenness.

Based on 769 online interviews, this research measures the environmental image of 93 business-to-consumer-based companies in the U.S. Highlights include:

• In spite of widespread, and growing, efforts among U.S. corporations to promote their environmental initiatives, companies with a clear, distinct "green" image are the exception rather than the rule.
• The top-rated companies include (among others) Google, Discovery Channel, Whole Foods, Apple, and Toyota.
• While the highest-rated companies have changed little from the first wave of the study in summer 2008, many industries have seen a slight dip in ratings -- suggesting a halo effect from the economic downturn that has bled into green perceptions.

The research is available for download at nominal cost on our homepage, and we're planning additional survey waves to track companies' images over time.

Comments or questions can be directed to Jason Grucel at greenresearch@thetaylorgroup.com or by calling 603.422.7600.