The Home Depot as introduced a new program called “Eco Options” which attempts to identify environmentally friendly products throughout its store. These products will clearly be labeled as part of the Eco Option program and will have less of an environmental impact than similar home improvement products beside them.
Eco Options
Promoting environmentally friendly home improvement and building projects is not a unique marketing plan for a business to take, but the fact that it’s a company as large as The Home Depot does grab headlines. The Home Depot is not only hoping to help the environment and reduce energy usages, but it makes good business sense. Many “green” and environmentally friendly products are now much more affordable than they were just a few years ago, perform much better and are much more in demand as consumers look for more ways to save money and energy in their homes and businesses.
The Home Depot introduces its new Eco Options Environmentally Friendly Products program
According to Home Depot:
Products with the Eco Options label are either eco friendly by definition, such as solar lights that use natural power, or have met certain environmental performance criteria verified by Scientific Certification Systems, an independent standards development and certification company. Eco Options products fall into one of five categories: clean air, water conservation, energy efficiency, healthy home and sustainable forestry.
While The Home Depot has been forwarding environmentally friendly policies for years (they use a lot of recycled materials in their stores and they changed their wood buying preferences to more responsible producers under pressure in 1999), this is the first large scale in-store promotion.
Interestingly, The Home Depot no longer links directly to Eco Options on their website. Some of their stores still carry environmentally friendly displays and they still advertise the “green” benefits of many of their products, but the actual tagging of certain products as being part of their “Eco Options” has faded a bit.
The Eco Options website has a lot of nice features. Each section of the Eco Option area has a few different calculators of various types you can use (calculating energy savings or fertilizer needed or something similar) and each area is filled with facts and, of course, products you can buy. Remember that larger energy efficient products and projects done around the house often qualify for energy efficiency home improvement tax credits.
The Home Depot stores themselves will also continue to be environmentally friendly and all the stores will begin converting the majority of the bulbs they use to compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs). The company will also plant thousands of trees in downtown Atlanta, GA to try to offset some of the emissions put out by its headquarters which is located there.
Lowe’s, The Home Depot’s national rival, also has a similar program called the “Efficient Home” program, though it does not generally seem to be branded and marketed as heavily as The Home Depot’s Eco Options.
