The Green Hearth Retailer Blog

From Counterculture to Mainstream

Our home building industry has taken quite a hit this year. It may take several years to recover, but out of the ashes will likely emerge a new set of home buying values. Green values that is. Green home construction is already one of the strongest new home construction trends and a trend that will be much stronger as the home building industry turns around. Up to 10% of homes built in 2010 will be green certified. Many geographical areas will have much higher certification rates. How has this trend happened and what does it mean to hearth products sales?

It's true that green consumers are currently more city than country and more West Coast than East Coast. The green trend will be much like our clean burning wood stove and pellet stove trends that started in the West and grew to be extremely successful in all areas of the U.S.

Green values have been around for many decades. Some people are tired of green buzzwords like "environmentally friendly", "recycle", "energy efficiency" and "sustainable design" while others have chosen to completely ignore the concepts. Reality is that the words will be around for a long time to come and we're only beginning to see their positive results. We do have to give the Hippies a little credit for their mainstreaming of these concepts. The Hippie concepts that were going to "Save the Planet" in the 1960s are turning into policies that will make the U.S. a stronger nation in the next 20 years. Who would have guessed it?

So, what's wrong with protecting the environment and being more  resource efficient? What's wrong with importing less foreign oil? Sadly, some Americans are blindly against these green concepts because they connect green with environmental extremism or with a political party that they are not a member of.

Here's some amazing statistics from the US Green Building Council: Our buildings account for 65% of our electricity use and 36% of our total energy consumption. They consume 30% of all our raw materials, produce 30% of our waste and produce 30% of our C02 emissions. So, buildings are a huge target for environmental conservation, recycling, energy efficiency and sustainable design. Our hearth products can play an important role.

The green concepts of protecting the environment and being more resource efficient will result in conserving more of our natural resources and using less foreign oil. This has huge benefits for us all. You may not be a tree hugger nor believe that anthropogenic C02 emissions will soon cause worldwide flooding, but you can still believe that being more productive with less resources and using less foreign energy are important national goals. This doesn't mean that you've become an environmental extremist, but you may very well be an environmental conservative. It's interesting that political opposites can now share some important common ground.

What does all of this have to do with hearth products? It's simple. It means that many millions of consumers now have the basic values that motivate them to purchase greener products, including hearth products.

Your responsibilities as retailers are to know which hearth products are green and how to properly sell them to consumers with green values. Green hearth products, like green home construction products come in many shades of green. Some hearth products are not very green, but provide good consumer value. Some hearth products are not very green, but are expensive and offer consumers many desirable features. These products should be sold on their special merits and not be "greenwashed" and misrepresented.

So how do you identify a green hearth product? Like many green construction products, there are no hard rules for being green. Green can be green simply because it's greener than what's currently in use. To start with, here are some questions to answer:

  1. Which hearth products cleanly and efficiently burn a renewable fuel?
  2. Which hearth products do not contribute to global warming?
  3. Some say that heating with biomass cannot be green because biomass heating produces more fine particles than natural gas. What's fundamentally wrong with this statement?
  4. Which hearth products burn the same fuel as most central heating systems but can be green because they are more efficient?

HeatGreen will provide you with the answers, the in depth training and with the point of sale materials to properly represent those hearth products that are green.