The Goal Is to Do the Right Thing

By PAUL SULLIVAN

TERRACYCLE’S fertilizer is priced the same as its competitors’. It is on the same store shelves, from Home Depot to Wal-Mart. But comparisons stop there.

The company prides itself on making a product that its co-founder, Tom Szaky, calls “green to the extreme”: its base ingredient is made by feeding trash to worms and collecting their nutrient-rich wastes, a process that he perfected using dining-hall refuse as a student at Princeton University.

The product is packaged in used soda bottles, which instead of being recycled — requiring melting the plastic — are cleaned and relabeled. TerraCycle’s other products are likewise “upcycled” — a compost from an old wine barrel, a handbag from drink pouches and a bird feeder that is an upside-down two-liter soda bottle. This month, OfficeMax announced it would begin carrying TerraCycle’s eco-binders and drink-pouch pencil cases.

“We became the world’s first company to make everything out of trash,” Mr. Szaky said, although he is proudest of his competitive pricing, which will push sales from just under $4 million in 2007 to an estimated $8.5 million this year. “Every American wants to do the right thing for the environment, but few are willing to pay even a penny more for something that’s green.”

Mr. Szaky’s emphasis on being profitable and consumer-friendly, as well as green, is what Andrea C. Levine, director of the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, calls “Green II.” In the early 1990s, she worked in the New York State attorney general’s office policing bogus claims of ecofriendliness during Green I.

“There were people selling plastic forks saying they were environmentally friendly because you didn’t have to wash them,” she said. Nowadays, businesses are held to higher standards because consumers are more skeptical of claims and more aware of threats like climate change.

“Environmental claims are kind of like nutritional claims,” Ms. Levine said. “Consumers can’t evaluate them themselves.”

The building industry has established a ratings system as part of its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program, which awards points based on green criteria. The Organic Materials Review Institute issues rulings on whether a product can call itself organic. But there are few definite rules for what a company needs to do to call itself green.

Ms. Levine sees small businesses making legitimate efforts to provide information about their green efforts. “Consumers understand today that not washing plastic forks is not a serious environmental move,” she said. The absence of a standard criteria by which companies can compare claims, however, complicates the issue for businesses and their customers.

Companies like PlanetTran and Dropps are trying to give an ecosheen to such historically ungreen industries as airport livery service and detergent.

PlanetTran has a fleet of Toyota Prius hybrids in Boston and San Francisco that average 50 miles a gallon of gasoline — compared with under 20 for Town Cars — while Dropps puts its concentrated detergent in premeasured packages that dissolve in water.

Dropps takes pains to show how using its product helps the environment. Its detergent is biodegradable and phosphate-free. But the Philadelphia-based company tests credulity with a claim that the soap could eliminate the consumption of 6.2 million gallons of diesel fuel and save 502 million gallons of water if it were used in the 25 billion loads of laundry done in the United States annually with liquid detergent. Its spokeswoman acknowledges that based on its sales, Dropps accounts for only 2 million to 4 million loads a year.

PlanetTran takes a different tack, since taking public transportation would be greener than driving a hybrid car. Its founder, Seth Riney, views the service as an improvement over the public’s taking poorly maintained taxis, less expensive than using conventional limousine services and a tool for companies that want to reduce their carbon footprint. Its first large corporate account was Genzyme, a Boston biotechnology company with a green ethos.

“It’s one thing to have a green business,” Mr. Riney said. “It’s another thing to help other companies to be green.” Even TerraCycle is as ungreen as its competitors in one regard: it ships its products to stores in diesel-powered trucks. Mr. Szaky makes no apologies for this.

“The most sustainable concept is, ‘Don’t buy, use as few things as possible,’ ” he said. “But that’s never going to happen. We’re trying to change consumer behavior in the world’s biggest retailers.”

Farshad Sayan has been changing his company’s behavior so that his customers do not have to change theirs.

An Iranian immigrant, he has been in the dry-cleaning business around Boston since he was a college student in the 1970s. In the late ’90s, he decided to sell his chain of stores. With the deal set to close, he learned that the ground beneath one shop was contaminated with perchloroethylene, a common dry-cleaning solvent known as perc, which has been linked to increased risks of cancer.

Several hundred thousand dollars later, the soil was clean, but the deal had collapsed. After that, Mr. Sayan dedicated himself to becoming the greenest businessman he could possibly be.

Today, he operates Clevergreen Cleaners, a small chain of green dry cleaners.

The dry-cleaning machine sprays clothes with DF-2000, said by some to be a more ecofriendly solvent, instead of soaking them in perc. The process is better for delicate clothes, and the solvent can be reused.

His washing machines are designed to use a minimum amount of water, while the steam used in the pressing machines heats the dryers on its way up from the boiler. There are no incandescent lights.

Yet Mr. Sayan has not let striving to be green hurt his reputation as a conscientious cleaner. “We didn’t want to produce a mediocre product,” Mr. Sayan said. “We wanted to be green but the best.”

This highlights a quirk in Green II. It is about providing something to American consumers that is ready and affordable, but not changing their lifestyles too much.

“No one wants to drive 40 miles per hour all the time, so they buy a Prius so they can drive the way they were driving and save fuel,” said Jonathan Propper, founder of Dropps. “You’ve got to give people the tools. With Dropps, they won’t have to buy all that plastic.”

Those fighting for a radical solution are still marginalized. Greasecar can convert a diesel-powered car into a zero-carbon emissions vehicle for around $1,000 — and do the same for a commercial truck for about $10,000. But the company’s high-water mark for sales was just over $2 million in 2006, when consumers were shocked by rising gasoline prices. Now that people have become accustomed to paying more at the pump, Greasecar’s sales have slowed. One reason is the need for a commitment: Greasecar engines run on waste oil from restaurants, which owners must process themselves.