• New York Times, Monday, August 9, 2010 10:59 AM

Bausch & Lomb is launching a brand aimed at green-minded consumers that it says has been informed by two megatrends: products that look to nature for their best ideas and the growing influence of so-called Lohas (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) consumers, Andrew Adam Newman reports. The product, Biotrue, purportedly mimics nature by using hyaluronan, a substance developed for ocular surgery that has a pH level of 7.5, which is the center of the range for healthy tears.

The bottle will also be the first in the category to be clear. "One of the things we heard from customers was there was a lot of frustration of not knowing when they were going to run out of contact solution," says Lisa VanDeMark, vp for brand marketing at the company's United States vision care unit.

But Newman also talks to a couple of folks who monitor green claims; they take issue with Bausch & Lomb co-opting the green and Lohas labels. For one thing, the claim that the carton is 100% recyclable is no different from any other cardboard box, says Urvashi Rangan, project director of GreenerChoices.org. And Ted Ning, executive director of the Lohas Forum, calls the Biotrue.com Web site "a very meager effort to try to capitalize on green intentions."

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