By David Jenkin
Greenwashing can be defined as making misleading or wholly inaccurate claims about the positive environmental impacts of a product, technology, service or practice – it’s a form of window dressing to make a company appear more concerned about the environment and sustainable practices than they really are.
Owner and managing director of
Green Queen Communications, Jodi Lynn Karpes, explains; “Greenwashing is when the full environmental impact of something is actually harmful to the environment and drains scarce resources. A green product strives for sustainability in every aspect of its production process and must take into consideration fuel/oil, water, electricity, time, materials and so on.”
A sinful practice Underwriters Laboratories (UL), a US-based safety consulting and certification organisation, tackled the issue head-on in 2007 with the initiation of the
Sins of Greenwashing study, and conducted annual reports to assess the prevalence of the practice in the three years that followed. They initially identified six ‘sins’ of greenwashing after investigating 1753 environmental claims on 1018 products and studying the misleading claims for patterns. In 2009, they added a seventh sin to the list.
They listed those sins as follows:
The sin of the hidden trade-off: “Suggesting a product is green based on an unreasonably narrow set of attributes without attention to other important environmental issues.” An example would be the use of processes that cause unnecessary pollution to make a biodegradable product.
The sin of no proof: “An environmental claim that cannot be substantiated by easily accessible supporting information or by a reliable third-party certification.”
The sin of vagueness: “Any claim so poorly defined or broad that its real meaning is likely to be misunderstood by the consumer.” An example cited is the term ‘all-natural’, which fails to explain that many harmful chemicals are, in fact, natural.
The sin of irrelevance: “Claims that may be truthful but are unimportant or unhelpful for consumers.” An example given by UL is ‘CFC Free’ – although the claim may be true, CFC’s are banned by law.
The sin of lesser of two evils: “Claims that may be true within the product category, but risk distracting the consumer from the greater environmental impacts of the category as a whole.” An example given is fuel-efficient SUVs – it is still much better for the environment to purchase a smaller vehicle.
The sin of fibbing: “Making environmental claims that are simply false.” UL says this is the least common form of sin, but it was usually committed through a false claim of being Energy Star certified or registered.
The sin of worshipping false labels: “Committed by a product that, through either words or images, gives the impression of third-party endorsement where no such endorsement actually exists; fake labels in other words.”
A practice in decline The good news is that over the years that UL were tracking the issue, they noted a decline in the practice of greenwashing. In 2010, they reported that 4.5% of products examined were found to be ‘sin-free’, compared to only 2% the previous year. Additionally, within the same timeframe, the uptake of ‘greening’ was revealed, with the number of products claiming to be ‘green’ rising dramatically, by 73%, following a 70% increase in the previous year.
A report compiled by TerraChoice (a company in the UL global network) on the 2010 findings, stated: “Although the numbers are very small, the proportion of ‘sin-free’ products is increasing at a rate that is statistically significant … We need to be cautious in our interpretation of such small numbers, but we believe they’re early evidence of good news.”
In an effort to see whether that positive trend continued into the present era, media update approached
Focal Points Analysis* to do a case study. Although not as in-depth as UL’s study, Focal Points were able to track and compare the usage of two ‘greening’ terms in South African print media between 2013 and 2016, revealing the overall trend. When comparing a term often associated with the greenwashing sin of vagueness, “environmentally friendly”, with the ‘greener’ and more meaningful term “sustainable”, it was demonstrated that usage of the former was in decline while usage of the latter was rising.
Comparing occurrences of the terms as a percentage of the total of media mentions, in 2013 the words “environmentally friendly product” represented 47.3% of the count, while “sustainable product” represented 52.7%. Yet by 2016, usage of the vague term had dropped steadily to 26.2% compared to the ‘greener’ term’s 73.8%.
Wising up Karpes notes, “The ‘rise of green’ means that more consumers are better educated on what it truly means and that being environmentally friendly goes far beyond the product and towards the heart of the company.” With more educated decisions being made, Karpes believes, the practice of greenwashing is diminishing. “However,” she adds, “being green, is more expensive and only a small percentage of the population would rather pay more for sustainability. It's growing though, which eventually will equalise pricing.”
She concludes, “Business should embrace sustainability from the core and the rest will follow naturally. Live with the earth, not off it.”
Have you noticed anyone committing a greenwashing sin? Tell us in the comments below.