How green are your greens?

Sometime in 2018, we switched our milk subscription from a premium* offering Pride Of Cows milk (of an age-old company Parag Milk Foods) to premium* offering Humpy A2 milk (of a milk start-up The Organic Carbon). One of the reasons was our desire^ to switch to A2 cow milk. There is great A1/A2 milk debate available in digital space; not something I intend to cover here today. Other major reason was to switch from plastic bottle delivery to glass bottle delivery. We loved Pride of Cows milk, we really did. I am not being digitally polite or diplomatic here. It is something we absolutely loved and still fondly remember. But for 2+ years we were their customer, my wife Shikha had same feedback for them whenever someone came seeking one – “Get rid of plastic bottles”. Few alternatives appeared over this period which vouched for slightly better handling of plastic waste. But actual switch happened only when TOC arrived on the scene with their glass bottle delivery pitch. That is what got them a chance of trial and it continues to be important reason for our relationship so far.

Here is another one. I imagine I am not the only one here who is a regular customer (and fan) of Amazon. I am also a Bigbasket customer# for a long time. Maybe not a very frequent one, but it has always been part of my digital grocery shopping. Over recent years, Amazon’s inventory coverage has continued to increase overlap with Bigbasket offering. And it does not only apply to the product SKU, but it also extends to the speed of delivery. As a customer, I should be feeling happy about more choices. But there have been many instances where I chose Bigbasket for product purchase over Amazon, even when it was available for lesser price on Amazon. Given Bigbasket local warehouse-to-home delivery format, it does not need to add extra packaging for items. Amazon on the other hand needs do per-product packaging lot of times. My perceived notion of generating little less waste helps me overcome the guilt of paying more.

High quality food (and other stuff) was always a wish list item for many. Recent years have seen an explosion of sorts in this space. Organic food, cleaner food, highest quality produce, premium food (or snacks/supplements etc.) and similar offerings show up prominently in physical and digital formats. And why should it not? Everybody wants good quality food. It is little depressing that simple things like quality food/produce is a luxury instead of basic right of a citizen, not a topic of discussion here. Instead, I wish to comment on the format in which this high-quality produce is made available to us. Be it edible fruits like apple or plum pasted with quality sticker or beautifully packaged organic food in plastic packaging, environment friendliness is not catered to when our health friendliness is being tackled. I have always hated every-item-gets-a-label approach. I get it why it done. But still, what a waste! In a way, premium-ness of a content or experience always brings in some packaging / presentation element which always ends in waste basket. Because that is how a consumer feels special, isn’t it? Providers in vegetable and fruit space are of course taking it to next level. Plastic wrapped individual piece of vegetables, occasionally also labelled with company banner, are frequent sight not just on delivery channels but even on in-shop purchases.

Its not just vegetable / fruit delivery. Restaurants outings are out of the equation for now for obvious reasons. But we do order in food once a week. And senior leadership cringes every time on seeing the packaging waste. More exotic the dish / restaurant, more mini packages we get. Myntra changed their packaging from plastic to paper recently. This was noticed and appreciated at home.

But there is an issue with all the examples I have provided. They all cover last mile interactions. I as consumer may feel good seeing all the recyclable / reusable / non-plastic variations landing at my doorstep, I have no clue about 95% of the supply-chain path. So, it will be extremely naïve of me to form any opinion on true eco-friendliness of the transaction / interaction.

Take eco-friendly cars for example. In recent years, there is great push for green vehicles, specifically electric vehicles. Everyone is counting on these to make the world a better place. That is how they are marketed to potential buyers. But fuel is an operational element. Before a consumer sits in his or her latest and greatest eco-friendly electric car, it goes through a complex manufacturing and delivery process. I have zero idea how green or un-green that process is. And for that reason, I cannot speculate on the greeenliness advantage factor of an eco-friendly car once I combine environment cost of building the car with the operational cost of driving the car. That is something I have never seen anyone talk about. No sales pitch covers this information. Just like the sugar content in healthy juices :D. Like we compare post-tax returns when it comes to different investment schemes, it will be great if we could compare total cost of ownership from eco-friendliness front. 

Physical items still have an advantage. You can see them and have some opinion (even if incomplete) on their eco-friendliness based on packaging, distance of travel etc. How do you judge eco-friendliness of digital goods? The movie we watch, the long form article we read (blink blink), the game we play – we have absolutely no clue about the eco-quotient of these activities. And fun part is, it is not just a difficult thing to do for a consumer. It is extremely difficult thing to do for a provider too! I have spent my bit estimating cost of hosting software we operated. We would talk about consumer experience, performance, reliability, procurement & operational cost; there was never a discussion on eco-friendliness of our choices. To be honest, it was never ever in my thought process at any point in time. When you are running software on your physical data centers, you can at least pretend to have some notional idea on the eco-cost of your operations. Hosted solutions, abstracted infrastructure, collaboration of external services and similar things make it impossible for someone to even attempt computing an eco-cost. I at least cannot imagine what would be a good way to go about it. In travel ecosystem, nowadays carbon footprint is being used to send consumers on guilt trip before actual trip (:P) and part with some money on its name. But that is like a drop in the ocean. 

As a consumer, it is something not even on my mind. Minimalism, eco-friendliness, even vocal-for-local etc. are extremely visible conversations when it comes to physical goods. When has someone told you to listen less to your favorite songs, do little less binge watching, chat little less on office messenger and maybe also read less articles about greens on LinkedIn? We are only going to see continuous growth in digital consumption behavior. Any decrease on this front is out of question. Unless regulations start controlling and rationing our digital footprint. And that is not happening, not for now.

Other day, I saw a recommendation from family friend to purchase eco-friendly diyas (lamps) from amazon. I did not miss the irony. Although I did humor myself with the thought that eco-friendly diyas combined with not-eco friendly packaging/shipping will balance out overall harm to the ecosystem.    

Do you make your purchase decisions based on eco-friendly quotient? Do you think it is a concept which can be realistically approximated / implemented for digital medium? Do you feel it is a problem which can be solved? Or do you think its better if I try to get it out of my mind by binge watching that next great series?

* Premium – This term is highly subjective. It is often misused and plays important role in mis-selling. I say this with pride as a Vodafone RedX customer.

^ Our desire – I said it was our desire to switch. What I meant was that senior leadership in the house desired the switch. I, the minion, just followed leadership mandate.

# Bigbasket – It is the only hyper-local player I have admired ever since it launched in Pune. I also believed that Amazon’s entry into hyper local space would happen by Bigbasket acquisition. That did not happen. But when did I say that I am good with my predictions and hypothesis?