Feature

A green smoke screen

Profits still come before health, even if the image is eco-friendly, warns Ged Moran

Books such as the Green Consumer Guide, Green Consumer Supermarket Shopper’s Guide, and extensive media coverage have highlighted the supposed ‘greening’ of consumers, and the impact of environmental concerns on major retailers and manufacturers.

Yet although it would be churlish to deny that some welcome advances have occurred in high street shops, their significance remains to be seen. At best these changes reflect and strengthen a growing public awareness about environmental issues; at worst they are no more than the adoption of shallow ‘how green was my trolley’ advertising strategies — strategies that can readily be abandoned as marketing whims change.

While it is too soon to judge how deep-rooted the changes are, perhaps the issue of tobacco sales offers the most convenient litmus test of the sincerity of major retailers.

Even before the emergence of any claimed green consciousness, a curious myopia prevailed on this issue. Stores which are fiercely jealous of their expensively-cultivated reputations as responsible, even public-spirited organisations stubbornly don ethical blinkers when it comes to their involvement in selling tobacco. Despite the irrefutable evidence of the massive health damage caused by smoking, Sainsbury’s Safeways, Tesco and the rest still proffer feeble rationalisations about ‘responding to public demand’ as a justification for their collusion in this profitable carnage. Indeed, with kiosks handily placed by the entrance, topped by eye-catching illuminated signs and often selling cut-price cigarettes, it is clear that tobacco sales are seen as a marketing lure to entice customers into the store.

Given this uncompromising background, could the emergent green consciousness prompt a change of heart? After all it is difficult to imagine a product more intrinsically unacceptable on ecological grounds than tobacco. Quite apart from the health hazards (100,000 deaths each year in the UK alone), the damaging economic and ecological consequences for power countries of growing and curing tobacco are already well documented. Any retailer wishing demonstrate a thoroughgoing commitment to green issues could hardly have a better starting point than the removal of all tobacco products from the shelves.

Early indications of such a change of heart are, alas, difficult to trace. For example, Tesco’s much trumpeted announcement that it was ‘going green’ across the entire range of in activities prompted a polite inquiry (backed with information about the ecological damage caused by tobacco production) as to future policy on tobacco sales. Although the reply from their green supremo Dr Richard Pugh acknowledged that ‘this area is and will remain on our agenda’, it promptly retreated behind the usual smokescreen of waffle whose only green-sounding content was the platitude that ‘this is going to be a tough mountain to climb’.

However, these embarrassed banalities are at least preferable to the stance adopted by Woolworth’s On the risible pretext that ‘there is an historic association between confectionery and tobacco-related products’, these doughty champions of the public interest blithely admit that their contract with their tobacco franchisee requires them to locate the cigarette kiosk next to the sweet counter. Doubtless future generations of smokers will bless Woolies for having made it so convenient for them to get started while they were still young; meanwhile, Woolies chair Geoff Mulcahy is one of the businessmen imported by Mr Clarke to tell us how to run the health service.

Perhaps attitudes of such cynical amorality will be eroded by a rising tide of consumer pressure. But for the time being at least it seems that most major retailers are as hooked on tobacco as the most dependent of nicotine addicts. Until they are willing to kick the habit once and for all, a healthy scepticism about the sincerity of their newly-discovered ecological consciences is entirely appropriate.