Companies try to cash in on green trend, but should consumers buy it?

Does anyone want a tree?It's a foot-tall spruce. I'll even throw in the green-checkered, cotton bag it was tucked into, along with the pine cone decorated with a tiny wood chip painted to resemble a little bird. How, you might wonder, did I wind up with a tree in a box?
Follow the logic of Coinstar, the Bellevue-based coin-counting company that sent it to me:
Copper mining has big environmental impacts. Coins have a lot of copper in them. If you leave those pesky pennies sitting in your sock drawer, someone has to mine more copper to put new pennies into circulation. Thus, taking your change to a Coinstar machine is good for the environment.

And nothing says eco-friendly like mailing a spruce to a newspaper reporter.
Welcome to the green-selling machine.
The idea that sex sells is now sharing space with the fact that green sells. Big time. Corporate America has discovered that it tugs at customers' heartstrings these days. People seem to have a big appetite for all things green.

Sales of organic products have gone from $10 billion in 2003 to more than $16 billion in 2006, and were expected to surpass $20 billion last year, though the numbers are still being tallied. More broadly, products sold as sustainable or healthy — everything from vitamins to wind power — added up to more than $200 billion in the U.S. in 2005, by