Why the green approach won't clean up the environment

Simply? Because it's been commercialized.

That's not to say that the green mentality, as it's meant to be, wouldn't have worked. Only that it won't work any longer because the companies have gotten hold of it and bent and twisted and pureed every ounce of meaning from it.

Case in point:

Today we received a junk mail advert the size of a large postcard with the similar hard feel and glossy image on the front (in this case from The Boxford Farm in Suffolk). As far as I can see, the point of the advert is to give a coupon for a 50p discount on Copella fruit juice. So? you say, what's unusual about that?

Yes, we all get vast amounts of junk mail each week and that, in and of itself, is not unusual. In this case, however, the coupon, itself, is less than 1/4 of the postcard. The rest is meaningless babble, some personal-sounding smoozy letter that no one will read. This wouldn't even be 'bad' or noticable, just a corporate gimmick, if it wasn't for the labels at the bottom of the card:

'Paper sourced from a FSC sustainable forest
Printed using waterless presses and vegetable based inks.'

So, as far as I understand it, this company has intentionally chosen eco-friendly paper as...?...a sneaky appeal to the conservationist in all of us? It can't be because they actually care about the environment or reducing the size of landfills or their carbon footprint, etc. If that was the case, they might have thought that they didn't need a postcard advert 4 times the size of the coupon! With the same amount of paper, they could have produced 4x the number of coupons/adverts or, of course, they could have printed the same number while only using 1/4 of the paper.

And so, until everyone (companies included) actually notice this specific problem in logic, and until everyone actually cares about this kind of thing (and how many of us really do?), the 'green mentality' is doomed to be relegated to just one more useful tool in the corporate advertising machine.