Sustainability Blog

Once Upon a Time in Green Land

By Apurva Gosalia - Jun 21, 2021

Regular readers of Sustainability InSite might know that I like travelling to barren islands. In the past, I’ve written about a dead glacier on Iceland and Overshoot Days on Lanzarote. So, you might think that from the title that today’s post is about the world’s largest island, located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, namely Greenland.

Indeed, I could write about the island for two reasons. First, because it’s on my travel bucket list. Secondly, because its largest city of 18,000 people, Nuuk, is in the process of becoming the world’s first certified sustainable capital under the EarthCheck Sustainable Destination Program.

But in this post, I want to write about another “Green Land.” It’s a fantastical place where everything and anything with even the most tenuous connection to being sustainable, recyclable, renewable, reusable or non-toxic has the word “green” pinned to it.

Like the 1997 Hollywood thriller “Cop Land,” in which a fictional New Jersey town is overpopulated by New York police officers, “Green Land” is overpopulated by the word “green.” It is also overpopulated by lubricant players that are, as the German idiom goes, still green behind the ears. They are metaphorically immature and inexperienced. Why so? Well, because they are still not taking steps toward calculating, cutting down and compensating for their corporate and product-specific carbon dioxide emissions.

In future columns on Sustainability InSite, I will be describing “Green Land” through five key terms, which also feature this word so misused by lubricant companies and industry associations. They are:

  • Greenhouse gas
  • Green Deal
  • Greenwashing
  • Green marketing
  • Green lubricants

Discussing what goes on in “Green Land” is crucial to understanding how to operate a sustainable company, and it deserves more than just a short blog post to shine some light in the darkness. Stay tuned and …

STAY SuSTAYnable!

More in-depth definitions and discussions on this and other topics are available to Sustainability InSite subscribers.

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