How Conservation Becomes Good Business for Chemical Companies and Consumers Alike

It might seem like coincidence that these two items got the attention of the trade media this week, but if you think about it a bit more deeply, there are some deeper connections at work.

This article in GCI reinforces what we’ve touched on previously, and what’s been the buzz of the personal care and beauty sectors for a long time now: green is good, and it’s becoming more multi-dimensional than before, as they point out…

While health is still a primary concern when it comes to ingredients…we’ll see an increasing focus on the environmental and social credentials of beauty products over the next year – with water efficiency a key concern.

That may not register as much for U.S. audiences, but it probably will over time. For consumers in other countries, how manufacturers deal with water conservation and environmental concerns are already a matter of importance. It’s not simply about how organic or natural the product is, but how it was cultivated or sourced, too.

Conservation as a bottom-line consideration

Take that into account as we consider a new program from SC Johnson, aimed at enlisting consumers to help save the Amazon rainforest. It’s an acre-for-acre match challenge, where for every acre protected through Conservation International (CI), the company will double donations, up to a total of 10,000 acres.

It’s part of SC Johnson’s partnership with CI to support a virtual reality film, Under the Canopy, which highlights why people need Amazonia to thrive due to its role as the world’s largest watershed, absorbing carbon and regulating our climate.

Some might accuse SC Johnson of being self-interested and cynical, but the company has a long reputation of supporting philanthropic and societal causes around the world.

Plus, it’s just good business for reasons that go beyond altruism or how much PR traction they reap. It relates to the very core of what they do.

Like so many others, SC Johnson is a company that’s been built on product development, and that obviously involves chemists, biochemists and other scientists. For them, preserving a resource like the rainforests isn’t simply a matter of earning goodwill. They may have only begun to touch the trove of naturally-sourced compounds and chemicals waiting to be discovered in places like Amazonia. That matters even more as consumers pointedly seek out products that can lay claim to natural and organic ingredients.

So, preserving these areas becomes a matter of ensuring there’s a ready source of innovations. It’s estimated that only 1% of all flowering plants have been investigated for their useful chemical or medicinal properties, and the Amazon is home to a huge percentage of earth’s total biomass. Nearly every week, it seems there’s another discovery about the beneficial qualities of its flora or fauna.

So safeguarding these resources is, in many ways, a bottom-line consideration for companies that want to continue developing new products and compounds. When it’s driven by the concerns of multinational companies and global consumers, there’s more chance places like the Amazon will be able to endure.