The other day I was searching for something on the web when I came upon the site of another glass company. As I was checking it out I noticed something that seems to be an ongoing problem within our industry, DECEPTION! Deception in the claims that companies make that are misleading or just plain lies. The most glaring on this site was the claim they use RECYCLED content in their glass products, implying that the recycled material is post consumer content. Just about every glass professional knows that there is really no such thing when the product is float glass. Float glass has to always be made of virgin content or the cut offs from the float line (post industrial content) in order to comply with the producers standards.
Yet, on this
site for all the world to behold is the claim of this southern California
company, “Available with 100% recycled glass”. They even have their samples
marked as “100% Recycled Glass”. Yikes!
So are they completely ignorant or using deception to make sales? The irony is
that I am sure that there are many designers out there that believe this lie
and use these products because they believe this lie. Either way the owners of
this company should be ashamed of themselves for using this deception to
generate sales or they are just plain stupid. (Sorry, the only word I could
think of to describe them).
So here in lies the bigger issue. Anybody can write anything they want on their webpage. They can lie about Recycled content, they can lie about their products LEED attributes, they can lie about anything they want and the design community eats it up.
I don’t have the answer to the question, so I will continue to get aggravated when I read this stuff, and hope that one day people will have some morality in their marketing efforts ( I just made myself laugh).
