In order to understand Green Value, we need to demystify and contextualize the current market framework. To make a difference, we must first understand what’s really happening.

We live in an age in which time is quickly running out to halt the damage to the planet. This particular concept is hammered into brains from work to school, from the news to our social media, and climate urgency is generally accepted as a fact. There are some amazing people working to find solutions but for the average person, this urgency is only a background fact. Most people don’t know where to begin to make a positive impact. We listen to experts in the field but what if brands we trust are abusing that trust?

Many corporations are indeed capitalizing on this climate urgency and public sentimentality. This is called Greenwashing. This is where corporations go to make an unsubstantiated marketing or press claims in the name of ecological benefits to improve public perception for profit.

One famous example of this is using buzzwords such as “bioplastic”, which is often conflated with biodegradable plastics. Another famous example of greenwashing is carbon sequestration in manufacturing, where certain processes of carbon capture emit more carbon dioxide than it captures - but manufacturers nevertheless sign up to boost their CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project) scores. There need to be more brands that earn back the public’s trust with transparency and green products that deliver real value.

Green Value

To us, “green value” is about the nexus of sustainability and affordability. It’s about products that offer lower costs, while at the same time embracing environmentally conscious ingredients and production practices.

At Clean Brand, we believe Green Value (meaning mass adoption) is the key to collectively make an ecological impact. Thus far, a good deal of green items targets the wealthy - think from electronic vehicles such as Tesla to shopping for “natural” consumer staples at a premium. At best, people occasionally pay the premium and at worst, some of these “natural” claims are unsubstantiated greenwashing buzz words. A category you see a lot of this abuse is in the beauty industry, in which many brands deceptively charge consumers a premium for unrealistic claims. The majority of America cannot continuously afford these premiums for green products. So how do you get people to make the green choice?

If you make a standard product green, convenient, and less expensive, the choice would be a no brainer. Climate change critics often blame CONVENIENCE as what got us to this place where waste and disposability are the rule of the day. Psychological studies back this claim that convenience is the driver of behavioral change. Therefore, it would make sense that convenience has to be the answer for everyone to make the sustainable choice every time.

Green Value as a trend doesn’t yet exist at the time of writing this in 2022. There just aren’t any green companies wanting to offer more for less. It isn’t because they don’t want to - you really have to think outside the box to make a green item more convenient and affordable. An easy example is material limitation of raw materials such as organic farming or paper substitutions products that are simply more costly. So how do you develop a green item that is value based?

How We Did It

We don’t have the solution for others but we can tell you the Clean Brand story. We noticed packaging was one of the most waste generating components of consumer staple products. Refill products already populate store shelves but their costs aren’t particularly lower and many products still use wasteful packaging. To us, this is the antithesis of green value. So like a math problem, we wanted to reduce the problem to its common denominator that can be factored out. The answer is water!

Water is an undeniable common ingredient for 90% of bottled products from drinks to cleaners to beauty. Water is also something most consumers have access to. If you remove the replaceable common denominator from the equation, the dehydrated chemical ingredients are a lot smaller, cheaper, and greener for the consumer. The end result is the size of a tablet like a pill from your Rx or about the size of a quarter. Instead of lifting 10 lbs of refill, imagine fitting 10 bottles of soap or cleaner fitting in the palm of your hand.

By removing water, it becomes far more convenient for the consumer to take it home but also cheaper to transport. Imagine a freight truck: instead of fitting 20,000 bottles, you can now fit 20x more, which drastically reduces transportation emissions. Instead of paying for the hefty cost of water, you ask the consumer to only pay for what they need. Clean Brand passes these savings to consumers and delivers 5x the value for the same product.

Green value sounds great, so naturally, this leads to the next question: If this was so smart, why has it not been done before? Innovation is difficult and the bottleneck was in the preservation of dehydrated chemicals. For more than a decade, no one had figured out how to preserve the rehydrated liquid. Without a shelf stable formula, these dehydrated products go bad in a few weeks or less. For liability reasons, developing a mass market product was impossible. At Clean Brand, we solved and patented this problem. Our innovation allows Clean Brand to deliver green products at an unprecedented value and hopefully, opens a doorway to the future of sustainability.