What is greenwashing?

What is greenwashing?

Subject: Environment

• Greenwashing refers to “the practice of making products, activities, or policies seem more environmentally friendly or less environmentally damaging than they actually are.”
• Essentially, it consists of two behaviours –

1. Suppress negative information regarding a product/activity/policy’s environmental performance;
2. Expose positive information about the environmental performance.

• The term is commonly used to refer to deceptive marketing and advertising tactics used by some corporate industries to deceive stakeholders into believing that a particular product is environmentally friendly.

How did the term ‘greenwashing’ emerge?

• ‘Greenwashing’ is a play on the word ‘whitewashing’ which means misleading people with the use of facts, half-truths, and fiction to conceal realities.
• Environmentalist Jay Westerveld is credited with coining the term ‘greenwashing’ in 1986 in a term paper on multiculturalism.
• In 1999, ‘greenwashing’ was officially included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

How is greenwashing done?

In 2007, the advertising consultancy, TerraChoice Marketing, described what it called the “seven sins of greenwashing” or types of misleading sustainability claims.

1. Hidden trade-off– where a company claims that a product is ‘green’ based on extremely narrow attributes without attention to other important environmental issues.

• For example, Paper is preferable to plastic because it is biodegradable, but there might be a few other environmental concerns in paper-making such as greenhouse gas emissions and the use of toxic chemicals for bleaching

Claim is of“no proof”– where a company’s claims cannot be easily verified or are unsupported by reliable third-party certifications.

• For example, if a product is labelled ‘environmentally more preferable’.

“Vagueness” is another type of claim made to mislead customers using poor or broad definitions.

• For example, ‘all-natural’ is not necessarily ‘eco-friendly’ since environmental poisons such as formaldehyde, arsenic, mercury, or uranium are ‘all-natural’ but toxic in nature.
• In another example, a package containing a product may be labelled ‘recyclable’ without clear reference to whether the packaging or the product is recyclable.

“Worshiping false labels” where claims through words or images are made to give the impression of a third-party endorsement although none exists.

The list also includes “irrelevance” and “lesser of the two evils” as two separate types of greenwashing.

• Irrelevant claims are those that may be technically true, but unimportant or unhelpful to consumers seeking environmentally preferable products.
• For example, a product that is labelled as ‘has 50% more recycled content than before’ may now have 3% recycled material, as compared to the 2% it had before.

“Lesser of the two evils” is a type of claim that may be true within the product category but distracts consumers from the greater environmental impact of those products as a whole.

• For example promotion of natural gas as a ‘cleaner fuel’ than coal, although the costs of extracting natural gas through methods such as fracking are hugely damaging to the environment.

“Fibbing” is another “sin” of greenwashing, where the claims are simply false.

• American politician Ed Gillespie later added three more types of claims to this list – suggestive pictures, best in class, and gobbledygook.

1. “Suggestive pictures” is where images are used to imply a green impact when in fact none exists.

• An example of this would be an image of plants/flowers emerging from the exhaust pipe of a vehicle.

2. Claims in the“best in class” category, declare that the brand is slightly more eco-friendly than the rest of the industry, even though the industry itself is highly unsustainable.

• This is very similar to the “lesser of two evils” type of claims.

“Gobbledygook” refers to a strategy where a brand uses jargon to confuse consumers.

• For example, ‘locally grown/organic’ food products may still be produced in ways that harm the environment and degrade the soil.

Who is guilty of greenwashing?

• As per an anonymous survey conducted for Google Cloud, roughly two-thirds of CEOs from U.S.-based companies question their companies’ sustainability initiatives.
• Most global companies including international giants such as Nestle, Unilever, Amazon, Ikea, and Coca Cola have been accused of greenwashing.
• Apart from ‘solutions to plastic pollution’, ‘reduction in carbon emissions’ is another topic commonly used for greenwashing – one that automobile and oil companies are famous for.
• In a well-known case of greenwashing, Volkswagen admitted in 2015 that it cheated on emissions tests by installing devices in its cars that could recognise when emissions tests were being conducted.
• The latest comprehensive report on the climate claims made by oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP, states that most of their claims are greenwashing.
• In addition, seized internal emails have revealed that these companies’ public commitments to net carbon zero goals are meant to be ‘green’ eyewash.

And it’s not just industries–

• Governments have also been accused of greenwashing when the COP26 was accused of being a ‘greenwashing event’ as climate activists argued that the current systems of carbon offsetting were just tactics being used by polluters to avoid real emissions cuts.

How is greenwashing harmful and what can be done about it?

• One of the major motives of greenwashing is to create public confusion and manipulate public opinion to sway consumer markets.
• For example- Malaysian Palm Oil Council claimed palm oil to be eco-friendly, but in reality it is associated with deforestation, loss of rainforest species and habitats, pollution from burning to clear land, and destruction of flood buffer zones along the rivers.

Way forward–

• Strong social accountability and a tripartite system, consisting of an organisation, a regulatory authority, and a third party (made up of stakeholders, civil society members, NGOs, etc.) have been suggested as ways to curb greenwashing.