Saturday, November 17, 2007

eco bullet bullshit

Different businesses start in different ways. The most general way is that someone sees what they consider a ‘gap in the market’ and they start a business to service the people in this gap. For an ethical business they maybe against animal testing for instance, so they start a make-up company that doesn’t do animal testing. Because they know there are a lot of people out there who feel the same as them and that will be happy that there is now an alternative.

What I hate is a business try to retrofit themselves to fit in with the ethical model, when they don’t actually believe in it. To them it’s not a political movement but just another market segment to be exploited. One extreme example of this is ‘eco-bullets’. There are now companies that are producing bullets that are not only made in environmental conditions, less-polluting factories etc. But are actually designed to decompose better. The thing they fail to realize is that in the world of ethical business, some businesses should just not exist at all.

If you go to an ethical investment company and say I’d like to buy shares in a weapons maker, casino, fertilizer company or cigarette manufacturer, they will turn you away. These companies not matter what their practices are unethical and bad just because of what they do. It doesn’t matter if the bullets break down nicely in the environment, they are built to kill. These companies make money by ending human lives. Where is the fucking morality in that? If a company doesn’t start out with a mission of being the ethical alternative to something else, or has just had good practice’s from the start due to the common decency of the owners then it shouldn’t be regarded as anything but a green wash marketing scam.

To help out I’ve included some ‘eco-bullet’ slogans to help them cash in on peoples legitimate environmental concern.

‘They kill people, not the planet’

‘Eco-bullet: the mean, GREEN, killing machine’

‘if Ghandi had a favorite bullet it would be this one’

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