Funny how I just blogged (http://www.wetakeiteasy.com/) about certain products that are supposed to help greening your life and are exactly the opposite...
I think the same goes for diet products, etc. Certain people love to make profit out of others good intentions.

most disappointing to me is the false advertising run by Horizon Organic foods - while they are "organic," the company has been exposed to treat animals just as cruelly and inhumanely as the rest of the coldhearted industry. The happy cow on their label says otherwise. Don't buy Horizon, buy local.

PVC and plastics are big ones: it's reusable so it's green! Well -- not really.

I think the biggest greenwashing scam was bottled water. So many of us believed that it was better for us, and it's so completely awful on so many levels.

I'm actually still not sure about florescent light bulbs (given that they contain mercury -- and a lot of people don't dispose of them properly!!)

Fluorescent bulbs do contain mercury. But even if you tossed them into the trash instead of having them properly recycled, you'd still be pumping less mercury into the environment than you would have if you'd stuck with incandescent lights. That's because coal is burned to generate something like 50% of our electricity, and burning coal releases tons of mercury into the environment every year. Fluorescent bulbs and compact fluorescent bulbs use so much less energy than their incandescent counterparts the tiny amount of mercury the contain is more than offset by their dramatically-reduced energy requirements. This goes double in warm climates, where the heat thrown off by incandescent lighting increases the load on air conditioning systems.

And even tossed in the trash, much of the mercury contained in a bulb would be sequestered in a landfill for hundreds - or even thousands - of years. Not immediately dumped into our lakes, streams and on our crops, the way mercury from coal-fired plants rains down on us.

Sunspot42 -- thanks for explaining! That's pretty scary about coal burning. No wonder there's so much mercury floating about. I'll definitely give florescent bulbs another chance (though soon I"ll have to figure out how they compare with LED's).

I'm not sure what to think about Chilewich either. It's recycled, but it's still vinyl. I was a little surprised that it was so readily embraced by some of the more progressive stores around here, but as you demonstrated when it comes to florescent bulbs -- what do I know!

I've been duped by a lot of fashionable ingredients and foods and health scares. Particularly the rumors that start about which cosmetics ingredients are safe and which aren't. We're told to avoid parabens... fine, but then so many companies move on to preservatives that have been tested and researched even less and we buy those because the word on the ingredient list hasn't become a naughty buzzword yet. We also mistake those products for healthier when they might be more harmful.

I won't even get into fad 'health food' products :/