A Debate over 'Greenwashing'

Gianfranco's Zaccai's column praising the Swiffer as ecofriendly sparked outrage in the blogosphere. Here, he answers questions from one skeptic on “profitable sustainability”

"Our voracious and seemingly endless appetite for more, better, bigger, and easier is leaving our planet overrun, and creating an environment that may not be able to sustain human life. As designers, are we partially responsible?" asked Gianfranco Zaccai, CEO of design consultancy Continuum, in a recent BusinessWeek.com column (see BusinessWeek.com, 2/21/07, "Matching Sustainability with Profits").

Good designers, Zaccai argued, work with sustainability in mind, creating products that fulfill the needs of the client without sacrificing the health of the planet. To illustrate what he called "profitable sustainability," he pointed to a product his company had worked on: the Swiffer. The Procter & Gamble (PG) cleaning system, he held, improved on the old-fashioned mop by saving millions of gallons of water, and the energy needed to heat it, not to mention preventing detergents from being dumped into the waste stream.

Two popular environmental blogs, Inhabitat (www.inhabitat.com) and Treehugger (www.treehugger.com), applauded Zaccai's call for more sustainable product design—and rejected the Swiffer as a paragon of sustainability. "[M]ounds of these disposables will only wind up rotting in a landfill somewhere, as their toxic chemicals slowly leach into our soil and poison the water table," argued Treehugger's Jasmin Malik Chua. Inhabitat's Jill Fehrenbacher and Jennifer van der Meer labeled the article "greenwashing," an attempt to pass off an unsustainable product as ecofriendly.

Blog readers jumped on the bandwagon, most calling the Swiffer "the epitome of waste" and saying the contention that a mop and water was less environmentally friendly is laughable. A few readers dissented­—one described kitting up his Swiffer with reusable cotton rags, rather than the disposable sheets. The lively debate inspired Inhabitat's van der Meer to contact Continuum's Zaccai and press him on the sustainability fine points. An edited Q&A, reprinted with the kind permission of Inhabitat, follows, in which the two discuss the research that went into designing the Swiffer, as well as the role of the designer in creating a more sustainable world.

In your argument about the Swiffer's environmental impact, you cite the fact that your design uses less water, energy, and toxins than a conventional mop. How did you analyze these impacts?

The development of the Swiffer was the result of our analysis of what average American households actually do to clean their floors. We discovered—by doing a lot of research, and observation in people's homes—that, on the average, kitchen floors are washed once a week, and that it requires a lot of hot water and detergent for washing, and then more hot water for rinsing. We further realized—just by watching a lot of people mop their floors—that people spend more time cleaning the mop than cleaning the floor.

We also discovered that most of the so-called dirt on the floor is not sticky, adhering dirt, it's dust. And water turns out to be a particularly bad way to get rid of dust, because the dust will just float to the surface, and then settle down in the form of mud. Again, we found that out by observing and analyzing—in excruciating detail, and many times over—exactly what happens when someone mops the kitchen floor.