Green marketing is the PRODUCTION, promotion, and reclamation of environmentally sensitive PRODUCTS. Green marketing includes a variety of activities and strategies, including recycling, pollution control and reduction, product development, POSITIONING, and reclamation systems. The emergence and importance of green marketing in the United States is associated with a series of events over the last three decades of the 20th century. When Americans protested the use of pesticides on the first Earth Day in 1970, they sent a message to marketers that they wanted chemical-free food products. Earth Day influenced the 1970 formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Love Canal tragedy came to light on the late 1970s when Lois Gibbs documented diseases among residents in a housing development built on top of a toxic-waste dump. Three Mile Island, the 1979 nuclear-reactor crisis in Pennsylvania, galvanized environmentalist fears, and Exxon became a symbol of environmental irresponsibility with the Alaskan oil spill created by its ship, the Exxon Valdez, in 1989. The Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), the Earth Summit in Rio (1992), and former vice president Al Gore’s book Earth in the Balance (1993) added information and pressure to change business strategies. Initially most American businesses responded to pressure from consumers and citizenry by instituting bottomup pollution-prevention programs to reduce wastes and environmental pollutants. In the process many firms found environmental management could generate cost savings. Green-market concerns were framed in terms of risk reduction, reengineering, or cost cutting. In addition to companies, communities across the country initiated recycling programs to expand the supply of recyclable materials, sometimes beyond the industry capacity to use them in the production of new products. Later some companies found green marketing could be used as a strategy to differentiate companies from their competitors. In the 1990s, whether through efforts to reduce pollution, increased use of renewable resources, donations to protect the rainforest, or new environmentally friendly products, American businesses began to develop green-marketing strategies. Most had to first overcome the problems of educating consumers about company products and green strategies, demonstrating tangible efforts and impacts and providing opportunities for choosing environmentally friendly products. The Federal Trade Commission developed Guides for Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, providing green marketers with assistance in complying with truth-in-ADVERTISING regulations. Early green-marketing efforts included organically grown produce, which some remember for being overpriced and of lower quality than nonorganic products. The utility industry is an often-cited example in green marketing. In the 1990s, many utilities, often under mandates from regulatory commissions, reluctantly developed sources of renewable energy, including solar, wind, and geothermal systems. Because these sources cost more to produce, companies charged a higher price. Consumers, who could not see the product, had to be shown the benefit of renewable energy sources and convinced the utility company was truly investing in environmentally friendly sources of energy. Consequently, green-marketing efforts by electric utilities have been only modestly successful. In the late 1990s, the Green Gauge Report, conducted by Roper Starch Worldwide, reported that Americans’ attitudes toward green marketing were changing. The report, which tracked Americans’ environmental knowledge and concerns since 1990, showed the percentage in most environmentally dedicated groups, labeled the “True-Blue Greens,” remained constant at 10 percent of the adult population. But the percentage of “Greenback Greens”—people willing to pay more for green products—had declined from 11 percent in 1990 to 5 percent in 1996. Some former Greenback Greens were now found in what Roper called the “Sprouts Group,” people who still cared but were unwilling to pay more; this group represented 33 percent of adults. The third group, “Passive Grousers”—those who viewed the environment as someone else’s problem— shrank from 24 percent to 15 percent in the 1990–96 period, but many of these consumers became “Basic Browns,” or environmental deadbeats—people who did not care much, if at all, about the environment. This group grew from 28 percent to 37 percent. Green marketing must appeal to consumers, but with increasing consumer apathy or indifference to environmental concerns, it has become less important among business concerns. Nevertheless, in a highly praised 1997 Harvard Business Review article, management professor Stuart Hart argues, “Rarely is greening linked to strategy or technology development, and as a result, most companies fail to recognize opportunities of potentially staggering proportions.” Hart outlines a current strategy based on pollution prevention and product stewardship, leading to clean technology and a sustainability vision for future strategies. Interest in and growth of green marketing will likely move in cycles as world economic, political, and environmental conditions change.