In this video Tom Guarriello responds to comments on his earlier "Do You Buy Green Products?" video. He begins by recounting his childhood in the Bronx, where discarding items indiscriminately was the norm, illustrating a cultural habit of treating waste as something that simply disappears. He describes a turning point when he encountered William (Will) McDonough’s TED talk and the Cradle‑to‑Cradle philosophy, especially the idea that “there is no away” – everything we produce remains on Earth. This insight reshaped his view of consumption. Guarriello then critiques the current “green” market, acknowledging that many products are marketed as environmentally friendly but often fail to deliver real energy or resource efficiency, labeling this as green‑washing. He argues that debating whether global warming is man‑made is less important than confronting the broader problem of thoughtless resource use and waste generation. The core message is a call to rethink our relationship with resources, recognizing that the challenge lies in redesigning production and consumption systems—a task complicated by politics and human behavior. He concludes by emphasizing that changing the mindset around waste, rather than focusing solely on green products, is essential for sustainable living.
Chapters
¡Hey, amigos! It's Tom Guarriello. I wanted to just make a quick video in response to all the comments I got on my "Do You Buy Green Products?" video. Those responses were really interesting to me because I think they reflect the current state of our thinking about green products. So I just want to tell you a story to kind of encapsulate my thinking and my feeling about the whole green issue. I grew up in the Bronx, and when I was a kid, the customary thing to do when you were done with anything was to just throw it away. It didn't matter where you were, you just threw it away. Mostly you just threw it on the ground, you know, you just threw it on the sidewalk, or you threw it in the street, or you just threw it— just threw it away. That was what we did. That was the common norm. If you were riding down the street in a car and you were drinking a can of soda and you were done with it, you threw it out the window. You just threw it away. And, you know, when you're brought up with that kind of a— I don't know, just an approach to how you do things, it's the way you usually stay, you know, for most of your life until you start to think about it. And, you know, obviously over the years I've had to think about it because, you know, One of the reasons I had to think about it is because I used to have friends who would look at me and say, "What are you doing?" I said, "I'm just throwing it away." They said, "What do you mean you're throwing it away? You have to, you know..." So gradually I became aware that throwing it away out the window, just to throw it away, was probably not the most responsible thing I'd ever done. And then a couple years ago, a few years ago probably, I was at the TED conference and I saw a remarkable speaker whose name is Will McDonough, and I'll put the McDonough link to the TED Talk up in the description. And Will McDonough, who wrote a book called Cradle to Cradle, has had a tremendous impact on the way many people think about environmental issues. Now, a lot of folks in the comments to my video made reference to, uh, as because I did, but I, I did because it was, it was impossible not to, made references to Al Gore and to the Inconvenient Truth video that he made. Um, but I want to just stay away from, from the global warming issues specifically, just because it really doesn't matter if, um, global warming is a man-made, uh, phenomenon or not. What matters is that our approach to consumable resources and consumables of all kinds is critical, just in terms of our ability to live in our world. We continue to create tons and tons of garbage every minute. Eventually, that's a problem. But McDonough's— the thing that McDonough did that had the biggest impact on me was addressing this issue. And he said in this speech, that, you know, he had also grown up in a time when you just threw things away. And he said, you know, today the concept of away has gone away. In other words, there is no away. You don't throw something away as if it were going to some alternate universe. Everything that we produce stays here, stays on our planet stays with us. There is no away. And that really hit me because, boy, if I ever grew up with a concept, it was a concept of away. Just throw it away. Well, as McDonough pointed out, there is no away. And whether or not we think green products are a hoax or whether we think green products are the best thing that's ever come down the pike, The fact of the matter is that our ability to control our resource utilization through the manufacture of products that are reusing resources is a tremendous challenge to us as a civilization. And so, uh, No doubt about it, the idea of green— remember, we live in a marketing universe— and so the idea that green is now the hip product marketing approach, undoubtedly the case, no question about it. Are a lot of the products that are being sold as green probably not as energy efficient As they pretend to be? Undoubtedly. We're talking about marketing. But the idea that we have to rethink our concept of resource consumption, I think, is for me beyond a doubt. Now, how we're going to do that and what means we're going to use to do that and etc. That's all up in the air because that's a function of human politics and just human thinking. But, so anyway, several of you asked what my thoughts were about green products, and those are my thoughts. I don't know whether or not green products are going to reverse global warming, For me, that's not the issue. The issue is that the amount of energy, the amount of resources that we consume in a thoughtless manner every day and simply dispose of, thinking that we're throwing it away, is for me a mindset that has to change. So thanks a lot, see you again soon. Bye.
