Eco-friendly Products: The Contemporary Soap?

In Soft-Soaping Empire: Imperial Racism and Commodity Advertising, Anne McClintock offers a social history of soap in 19th century Britain relating to commodities, capitalism, imperialism, and advertising. She explains that soap both created and sustained a commodity culture and the advertising created for it perpetuated ideologies of race, class, and gender. She asserts that in the 19th century, soap became “a new form of a new cultural system for representing social value” (507). When I was thinking about the link between hygiene and social prestige that McClintock contended in her article, I began to think about the contemporary relationship between eco-friendly cleaning products and status.

As we all know by now, the United States is obsessed with environmental friendly behavior, products, electricity, etc. In doing research on the topic, I even discovered a term coined “green marketing”, the marketing of products that are presumed to be environmentally safe. These goods and services, which are considered to inflict minimal or no harm on the environment, have become readily available in stores. Furthermore, to make consumers aware, environmentally friendly goods and services are often marked with eco-labels. As a result, many claim that environmental appeals are growing in number. Popular examples of this would be the Energy Star label, which now appears on 11,000 different companies’ models in 38 product categories, from washing machines and light bulbs to skyscrapers and homes.

In regards to soap and hygiene products, Seventh Generation, Inc. is a company that sells cleaning, paper, and personal care products. The company focuses on sustainability and the conservation of natural resources. It uses recycled and post-consumer materials in its packaging and biodegradable, phosphate and chlorine free ingredients in its products. Over Thanksgiving vacation, I was at Target picking up a few household-cleaning products for school, and I noticed that the Seventh Generation brand and it’s competitors were considerably more expensive than the store brand and even the other name brands. While protecting the environment is important to me, I would rather pay $6 for a few ounces of dishwasher detergent than $10 for that of the same size.

In thinking about the topic, it occurred to me that there is a certain “prestige” attached to buying these eco-friendly products. While they may be better for the environment, they are considerably more expensive, and as a result, in buying them, there is a certain status attached to their possession and ultimate use.