Green [brain]washing

An inevitable byproduct of the burgeoning environmental movement has been the propensity for advertisers to hop aboard the green bandwagon and sell themselves as environmentally friendly stewards of the Earth.

As sustainability (rightly so!) becomes in vogue, companies are doing back flips to present themselves as caring for the environment through their low impact and environmentally responsible practices and merchandise.

For someone like me, who imagines that in any given type of product (such as laundry detergent, for example) all the competitors’ products are probably essentially the same, and who won’t put much thought into choosing a brand to buy (except for whatever is cheapest), a product’s position on the sustainable spectrum can be a powerful force in influencing consumer behaviour.

The positive outcome is that as consumers demand more information on a product’s life cycle, its true cost if environmental impact was considered, and the eco-friendliness of manufacturing practices, companies will respond accordingly, factoring in the environment at every level of their operation.

Or they could just purport to, exploiting consumers’ enthusiasm for environmentalism to make a profit.

This deceptive advertising of products or practices as better for the environment when they are, in fact, not is called greenwashing. American environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term in 1986. He criticized the practice of attempting to appear as though an ecologically responsible mandate has been implemented when little or no real effort is being made towards changing practices.

The example that inspired Westerveld was the hotel industry’s practice of promoting towel re-use. We’ve all seen it – a statistic about all the water that goes to waste washing towels and sheets unnecessarily, and an encouragement to put the placard on your bed if you don’t want you sheets changed or hang up your towels to use them again.

While on the surface, no one can deny that encouraging this is extremely important and that towel and bedding re-use is a viable way to save millions of gallons of water in hotels everywhere, the practice also cuts costs for the hotel.

If this money saving “environmentally friendly” practice is the only effort being made towards sustainability, and other less profitable practices are being ignored, such as waste reduction, the practice is rooted in profit under the pretense of environmentalism, and is called greenwashing.

If you’ve recently felt cheered by the increasing volume of green products on the market, the reality is less encouraging. Unfortunately, many companies are guilty of greenwashing, revealing the deep entrenchment of the drive to increase profits. Rather than jeopardize profits by actually becoming better environmental stewards, a lot of companies will rather focus their marketing on appearing to do so. While the pressure to seem sustainable and exercise corporate responsibility testifies to the importance of these factors for consumers, it’s misleading, exploitative, and self-congratulatory.

How do consumer products get away with greenwashing? As outlined by environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, there are many ways that companies commit these sustainability sins.

1. Hidden trade-offs – claiming energy efficiency but creating products with materials that are hazardous for the environment

2. Lack of proof – we’ve all seen this one. Your shampoo may claim organic certification where no such “certification” exists.

3. Vagueness – “100% natural” doesn’t mean a whole lot when you consider that natural does not correlate to safe for the environment, as many hazardous substances could be categorized as “natural.”

4. Irrelevance – when products claim to be free of some substance or chemical that isn’t needed or was banned eons ago.

5. Lying (or, as TerraChoice’s study preferred, “fibbing”) – when companies straight up lie about being certified by a recognized environmental standard when they are, well, not.

6. Appealing as a lesser of two evils – this sin involves marketing your pesticides as “environmentally friendly, for example.

In TerraChoice’s 207 study that researched approximately 1,000 randomly selected consumer products, over 99 per cent were guilty of at least one of the aforementioned greenwashing tactics.

A new Tide commercial, you know, the one with the lovely blue detergent being poured over a mountain peak and flowing around trees and into rivers, says “Did you know that for years there’s been a laundry detergent that uses biodegradable soaps and is phosphate free. And since concentrating each bottle has reduced its plastic up to 43 per cent. Which also means, less trucks are needed on the road to ship it. That detergent is Tide.”

So while I have no idea if Tide is legit or not (their website is certainly impressive and they’ve done a swell job of appearing conscientious), the point is to exercise a degree of skepticism when responding to advertising.

Remember the rampant ills of greenwashing before congratulating yourself on saving the planet while washing your laundry.