Sadly, the industry I’m in is laden with myths, false claims, misleading statements, and general consumer confusion. The most common falsity I encounter is when a customer thinks a certain product is compostable or biodegradable when in fact it isn’t.
That is a challenging situation to navigate through. A customer has made a conscious decision to try to be more environmentally responsible, often going against what he’d prefer to do – the easy route of not making a change from his conventional disposables use – and usually paying more money to do so. You can imagine, it doesn’t always go over well to tell him that he has been completely misled.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are customers who adopted environmentally-friendly disposables early on and subsequently think that what they were told several years ago by the first salesman that called on him still holds true today. This situation is equally as challenging to navigate because the customer has relied on the sales pitch from several years ago to educate his staff and patrons about the products. He has donned himself a thought-leader role which makes it all that more difficult to inform him that what he was told several years ago is actually not correct or no longer valid.
This is one of the most difficult situations to overcome with prospective customers – convincing them that what they believe, or at least what they were told by other people, is not correct.
The only way I’ve found to be able to do this is by presenting facts. I can do that in the example above when I have to convince someone a product isn’t compostable when he believes it is. It’s not that hard to get data to prove that a product is compostable or not.
However, there aren’t always product tests and hard data available. Sometimes the only way to know the truth about products is to dive deeply into the supply chain, the waste stream, and the industry in general.
For example, companies who don’t sell bioplastics often sell against them by stating things like “they contaminate the recycling stream and create major problems for recyclers.” The truth of it, though, is that if you talk to people who run recycling facilities (MRFs) around the country, bioplastics are not showing up as a contaminate. Bioplastics are typically removed from the recycling process because they are usually made into shapes like cups and tubbed-shaped containers which largely can’t be recycled anyway even if they are made out of plastic and even if someone puts them in a blue bin. Those shapes of plastic containers end up being landfilled anyway or shipped to China, at least with the current U.S. recycling infrastructure.
That’s hard to explain to a customer if he adamantly believes that bioplastics are bad because some sales rep told him so one day a few years ago. And that’s not something in which hard data is readily accessible or easy to present. It’s based on industry knowledge, time spent in recycling facilities, and getting to know subject matter experts.
I don’t know a better way to overcome this obstacle that I routinely face. I guess I just have to keep presenting the facts, keep educating myself with accurate data, and hope that people will be open to change and new ideas. Do you have any suggestions for me?
