 If the modern environmental movement began with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the business of environmental marketing and communications began the following day. Where there is a problem, there is an opportunity. This is not to say that all environmental marketers are opportunists. Not necessarily. Indeed, our work at TerraChoice starts with the principle that commerce can and must be an important accelerant of environmental protection and sustainability. Genuine environmental leadership ought to be rewarded in the marketplace. When rewarded (with market share, price premium, public respect, and so on), it motivates other products to improve. It uses competition and free enterprise to pull the economy toward sustainability. But let’s not be naïve. For every legitimate environmental claim on the market, there are also false or misleading claims:‘greenwashing’. And, in the four decades of modern environmental awareness, it has become as predictable as the seasons that, as public environmental concern grows, so will the proliferation of greenwashing. We’ve come to see patterns in greenwashing and have begun to categorize them as The Five Sins of Greenwashing™. We recently conducted a consumer-level study of environmental claims, and the results are eye-opening. Here are a few examples of the false or misleading claims that we found, and that you’ll find – if you look – the next time you go shopping: - Aerosol containers that promote their being CFC-free despite the fact that CFCs were legally banned more than a decade ago and all aerosols are CFC free! This commits the Sin of Irrelevance. It’s a claim that is true, but doesn’t reveal a useful distinction between products.
- Paper products that promote sustainable forestry practices, while veiling dirty milling and production practices. (This is the Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off, because it is the “truth, but not the whole truth”.)
- Sport Utility Vehicles promoted as fuel efficient, as measured only against other SUVs. Organic tobacco. (These commit the Sin of Relativism. They are true, but distract the buyer from more significant disadvantages of the product category as a whole.)
- Cleaning products that falsely claim to have received third-party certification of environmental leadership. (This is easy. We call this the Sin of Fibbing!)
- Prolific claims – in virtually every product category - of “green”, “environmentally-friendly”, “eco-this”, “eco- that” and every imaginable variation, without any useful substantiation of explanation of the claim. (The very common Sin of Vagueness.)
Now, you might argue that I’m nit-picking; that these few bad apples are an inevitable but trivial distraction from the deeper sustainability movement. For four reasons, I think it’s a more significant problem than that. First, it is by no means just a few bad actors engaging in misleading environmental communications. (Of the 1,018 environmental claims that we inventoried in this recent study, only 7 did not commit at least one sin.) Second, and most obviously, well-intentioned consumers are misled into purchases that do not deliver on their environmental promises. (Or - as you’ll read in later sections of this report – are misled into purchases based on imperfect information about environmental trade-offs, or true but irrelevant environmental claims.) This means both that the individual consumer has been misled, and that the potential environmental impact of his or her purchase has been squandered. Third, the competitive pressure from illegitimate environmental claims steals market share and customer respect from products like yours – products that offer legitimate benefits. This slows the penetration of real environmental innovation in the marketplace. And, the final impact of greenwashing may be the most malignant: unchecked and unchallenged, greenwashing gradually engenders cynicism and doubt about all environmental claims. Consumers – particularly those who care most about real environmental progress – give up on marketers and manufacturers, and give up on the hope that their spending might be put to good use. Governments and standard-setting bodies have intervened to discourage greenwashing, but gently. In North America, for example, both the US Federal Trade Commission† and the Canadian Consumer Affairs office have issued guidelines for proper use of environmental claims. Under ISO 14024, the International Organization for Standards establishes standards for proper use of environmental information.* But it is our observation that when environmental interest is high, as it is today, greenwashing is nevertheless prolific. In the next few issues of EcoMarketer, we'll explore each of these Sins of GreenWashing. First up: the Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off. (Watch out, single-attribute labels!) † The FTC Guidelines for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims can be found at: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/grnrule/guides980427.htm * The ISO: 14024 Guidelines can be found at: http://www.iso.org/iso/en/CatalogueDetailPage.CatalogueDetail?CSNUMBER=23145
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