Gunther Pauli Cleans Up

What does that mean?

We are not just selling products or building a company. We are creating a system. We want to create a totally open economic system and a totally closed environmental system. That system involves everything we do. The products. The ecological factory where we build the products. How we communicate our message to customers. How we work with each other. Why we spend so much time on fair-trade initiatives in Colombia.

Let's start with the products. Consumers are more environmentally aware than ever. But I don't detect a mass revolt against detergents. How do you move people away from the familiar brands?

We show them that cleaning is dirty. What do you do when you clean? You take dirt, you add more dirt in the form of chemical agents, and then you put all that dirt somewhere else - usually into the water supply. Once people appreciate that they make other things dirty when they make their clothes clean, they think differently about what they're doing. They care about their impact on the world. They don't just want to wash white; they want to wash right.

Now it sounds like you do build your message around an environmental appeal.

This industry is a huge source of environmental damage. One-third of all pollution from households comes from cleaning products. People in the US and Canada bought 7 billion pounds of laundry detergent last year. But I don't think the environment per se is our leverage point into the mass market. The leverage point is personal health, in particular, the health of children.

We want consumers to evaluate cleaning products through the eyes of their children. I'm a parent. I know how upset parents get when their kids get a rash. Allergies among children have risen by a factor of five over the past 20 years. Thirty percent of US families report problems with skin allergies. We think detergents are a big factor.

Everyone has heard of the marketing concept of "whiter than white" - the idea that a white shirt or towel isn't really clean unless it is bursting with whiteness, even if it's old and the fabric has grayed naturally. People have been trained to demand this performance from detergents. What people don't understand is the toxic chemistry behind the "whiter than white" look. We help them understand. And they start thinking differently.

You ask people to wear drab-looking shirts?

No, we teach them about optical brighteners. We don't ask people, "Do you want whiter than white?" Of course they will say yes. We ask a different question: "Do you want to take a chemical derived from benzene, put it on your white clothes, let it absorb ultraviolet rays, get energized, and then emit ultraviolet rays with a bluish hue - all to trick your brain into thinking a graying shirt is white? Is there a value to that, especially when it may create health risks? Is it worth the hazards to your kids?"

A little story. You go on a skiing vacation in the Rocky Mountains. You don't want to get burned, so you put sunscreen on your face. You come in from skiing at the end of the day and you have a terrible burn. You wake up the next morning and you have a rash on your face.

You get angry: "This sunscreen is terrible!'" Not so. The sunscreen was fine. Here's what happened. You stayed in a hotel. You shaved before you went out, and dried your face with a beautiful white towel. What you didn't realize is that, by using the towel, you were also putting on a nice layer of optical brighteners. Then you put on the sunscreen. You go out in the sunlight and all those optical brighteners energize. But they are trapped under the sunscreen. You think you are burned. You're not. It's a chemical reaction. It's the optical brighteners.

Now go ask that same person: Do you really need an optical illusion, a chemical trick to make you think a towel, which is perfectly clean, is also bursting with whiteness? Once we persuade people to ask the right questions, and then offer an alternative, they move our way.

It sounds like a big part of your game plan is to turn the big companies into Public Enemy Number One.

Absolutely not. We don't lead boycotts. We don't run Greenpeace campaigns. We are not in business to attack Procter & Gamble. We are not in the world to punch Lever in the nose. We want to be positive. We offer solutions.

The challenge, of course, is turning your solutions into a business. How does your message break through the marketing clutter in an industry this vast?

With products for the home, we started by preaching to the converted. We targeted environmentally aware and health-conscious consumers. We are very strong in health-food stores in the Netherlands. We are very strong in pharmacies in Switzerland. This strategy built critical mass. We have revenues of $30 million. We sell products in 34 countries. We have 15,000 retail outlets.