Greening up the dirty business of advertising...

Advertising. It’s everywhere. It’s wasteful. It encourages overconsumption. It’s a menace to society. It sure makes a convenient scapegoat for many of society’s ills, doesn’t it? Well what if I were to tell you that there is now an eco friendly mode of advertising out there, that leaves the environment cleaner than before it was there?

Yes. It exists. GreenGraffitti, a service of Netherlands based graphic design/marketing firm Hemshaven, creates ads using three ingredients: Dirty, high foot traffic urban sidewalks, a stencil, and a high pressure water sprayer. Apply stencil to sidewalk, spray water, remove stencil, and you have a visually compelling, totally non polluting, long lasting (up to 6 months they claim) ad.

GreenGrafitti say it’s, “completely carbon neutral and contributes in a unique way to a healthier environment.” But the question comes to my mind, yes they’re not using paper, ink, PVC, etc, but what about all that water that’s used? They compensate for that using carbon offsets from Groenbalans The GreenGraffitti site says they offset, “From our water use to the kilometers we travel.” Really? Carbon offsets covering water usage I’ve not heard of.

However, moving beyond this one point, GreenGraffitti uses green web host Thinkhost, donate 5% of their profits to local organizations, and encourage clients to have them come back a few weeks later to completely clean the sidewalk where their ads have been placed.

Due to the simplicity of execution and ubiquity of the equipment needed, GreenGraffitti is available throughout Europe and even in the US but then again What message do you want to spread?