The latest on Home Depot’s Eco Options green products and Ron Jarvis

What is orange, green, and good for a residential home remodel or improvement project? GetWithGreen thinks one answer is the ever growing inventory of Eco Option products located around the corner at your local Home Depot.

This past week Ron Jarvis senior vice president of environmental innovation with The Home Depot and GetWithGreen.com, sat down to talk about the Eco Options program, and retail trends in green home product market.

Ron’s home improvement career spans 23 years, starting early on with Lowe’s, followed by 13 years at America’s largest home improvement retailer, The Home Depot. For the last eight years Ron has been tracking energy products for the retail giant, and now leads the company’s Eco Options program, among other environmental initiatives, reduced energy consumption by stores, reduced waste and increased recycles as well as increased sustainability into all business functions.

Eco Options is Home Depot’s product labeling program that allows customers to easily identify products that have less of an impact on the environment. The 3,000+ products are located throughout the orange shelves of the retailer. Early on, the Company decided to place green home products next to their lesser eco-friendly counterparts, rather than go for a “green aisle” approach. The Depot believed that consumers should be able to compare products, and also wanted to make it easy for homeowners to find green home products.

Today these products range from indoor construction materials such as insulation, moldings and green paints, to outdoor organic fertilizers. Ron tells us that adoption of green home products is accelerating as television, advertising and other media continue to keep ‘green’ red hot in front of homeowners. Ron estimates growth to be around 10% over the next 12 months even in a negative growth economy and like a presidential candidate knocking on rural doors, Ron often walks the aisles of THD sharing his green home product knowledge. (He claims that he has never met a customer that he couldn’t convert to CFLs J.)

So what are homeowners buying when it comes to green home products at Home Depot? Ron says we are snatching up ENERGY STAR appliances, Freshaire paint, CFLs, ceiling fans and programmable thermostats. In fact the Freshaire line of paint was one of their most successful launches ever selling more than we had anticipated across all markets. This zero-voc paint in eco-friendly packaging is being used from baby’s room volume to hospital volumes because it does not carry the toxic fumes of other paints.

But are the Eco Options products really green, or this just ‘green washing’? “That is the hardest part of our job,” Ron says. He employs a small team that vets all potential green home products. They check certifications, documentation, look at peer reviews, and always err on the conservative side to protect the Eco Options brand reputation.

And how do our favorite green home products get in line to be tested? Like a job applicant researching a potential employer, we are told manufacturers who want shelf space for their green home products typically pick a local market of 10-15 stores, study the stores in that market for how their product might sell, noting competitive prices, shelf location, and more. Once the research is complete, these manufacturers are set for a discussion with Ron’s team. “Manufacturer’s have got to do the in-store detail,” Ron says. The Eco Options team helps smaller companies with innovative green home products with distribution, so it’s not just the big boys that you see on the shelf.

During our conversation, I had one bone to pick with Ron, and it was the fact that the Eco Options products remain almost invisible on The Home Depot website! GetWithGreen.com brought this up last year as we generated our list of top eco-friendly home products and retailers. As of right now, the only way to find the Eco Options product online is by following a microscopic link at the very bottom of The Home Depot home page!!

Ron acknowledged our frustration in finding green home products in their online store. This being said, he wouldn’t tell me when this would change, but did say a plan was on the table to start labeling Eco Options products in all product searches on the site – thus placing the eco-friendlier options next to the lesser friendly. For now, one could argue the Company has taken a ‘green aisle’ approach online, when they voted against it for their in-store strategy – puzzling. (If you would like Home Depot to make Eco-Options green home products more visible, then click this link and tell them so!)

Upcoming products to soon hit the Depot shelves include a wider selection of high-efficiency toilets (HETS), faucets, window shades, organics and innovative building materials. Ron believes that, consistent education to the homeowners around these products and others will dispel outdated thinking that green eco-friendly home products have to cost 3x as much, and don’t work as well. GetWithGreen agrees, as this was and remains our founding mission.

By making green home product options as visible as possible, then homeowners can make easy and better decisions for our environment. “Our impact can be felt here on earth, and everything we can do, we should.” Ron says.

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