When someone seems to be playing fast and loose with numbers, it is an effective comeback to say, “You’ve been told a million times not to exaggerate.” We see it all the time in TV ads, though there is nobody to whom we can make such clever remarks.
My dad was in the advertising business, so we learned various techniques. Several types of exaggeration, considered unethical then, are now routine. Some ads use “facts” that are astonishingly wrong. Others omit context, making the facts seem worse. A new firm called Grove Collaborative begins its ads begin by asserting that “94,000 trees per day in the U.S. alone are destroyed for toilet paper and tissue.” Wow.
If that’s just for toilet paper, how many trees are sacrificed for all the office paper and junk mail, or for all the lumber and building materials? One environmental website claims 228 billion trees are cut down every year in the U.S., attributing the data (incorrectly) to the Rainforest Action Network. It is a complete misreading of the data – that is the total number of trees growing in the U.S., not the number harvested! Arborist and author Ben McInerney publishes the real numbers. The total U.S. harvest is about 266 million trees per year. Several websites place that number at 3.5 to 7 billion trees, another breathtaking misreading of data. That is the number for the entire world, not the U.S., and even that requires context. A study in the journal Nature estimated that there are over three trillion trees in the world.
In truth, about 729,000 trees are cut down daily in the U.S. for the products we consume. That sounds horrible if you like trees, as most of us do, but it requires context. Consider that every year Americans also plant at least 1.6 billion new trees – over 4 million a day – or about six trees for each one we use.
Beyond planting, consider the continued growth of existing trees, which far exceeds the amount harvested. The Food and Agriculture Organization keeps track, and reports that “Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.”
That’s not to disparage attempts to conserve such resources. Grove Collaborative says everything it sells is made from non-toxic, plant-based materials, show all ingredients, are 100 percent cruelty-free, and come from ethical and sustainable supply chains. That’s all good, easily defensible, and readily explained to a sympathetic public. So why the need to shock people with their ads? Because they want us to buy paper products made from bamboo, not trees. Presumably, cutting one plant is better than cutting another.
Another Grove goal is “100 percent plastic-free by 2025.” That sounds great, because “U.S. companies make 76 million pounds of plastic every day, but only 9 percent of plastic is recycled.” So, Grove now sells deodorant that comes in aluminum, not plastic. Plastic comes from oil, and aluminum comes from mining, so which is better/worse? Miners produced 382.5 million tons of aluminum ore in 2019, used in millions of products, from beer cans to airplanes – and now deodorant containers. And that’s just one of many metals we use. The U.S. Geological Survey says 3.6 million tons of metals are mined worldwide each year, mostly iron.
That sounds like we use an unconscionable amount of stuff, and that’s only the metals. The entire conversation reminds me of the need for perspective, because with any global issue, the numbers seem staggering. For instance, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that worldwide carbon emissions total nearly ten billion metric tons annually. That sounds awful. But how big is the sky? Earth’s atmosphere is often estimated at 620 miles thick. That is roughly 143 billion cubic miles of atmosphere, so the total amount of carbon emitted is about two molecules per million molecules of air. A former colleague and geologist says that is equivalent to adding a shot glass into an Olympic swimming pool once a year.
Context matters, unless the aim is simply to shock people into changing their habits. Maybe that’s a worthy goal, but advertisers ought to be honest about it. Armed with the best available information, I might buy toilet paper made from bamboo, and deodorant in aluminum containers. No need to frighten me into that. In fact, I am more skeptical because of the millions of times I’ve been warned about exaggerating.
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