Crucial Ways to Avoid Greenwashing While Verifying Environmental Claims

How can you avoid greenwashing?

You must understand the various greenwashing categories to avoid falling into the trap.

Hidden trade-off

• An environmental issue looks to be solved, but the solution contributes to another harmful issue.

No proof

• Environmental claims are not backed by evidence or third-party certification.

Vagueness

• Claims lack specificity and are broadly defined or meaningless.

False or misleading labels

• False or misleading certifications are used to deceive consumers. The impression of third-party endorsement is created when no such endorsement exists.

Irrelevance

• Products or services advertise an obvious environmental feature that does not matter, as it does not represent a strategic business, cultural or core value change for the organization to operate more sustainably.

Lesser of two evils

• Stating a product or service’s sustainability benefits that have no environmental benefits, or distract from the greater environmental impacts as a whole.

Blatant lies

• Making blatantly false environmental claims.

Environmental imagery

• Using environmental imagery, such as images of the Earth, flowers and animals.

Crucial ways to avoid greenwashing

Organizations can typically avoid greenwashing by:

• Making product or report claims clear and easy to understand
• Backing sustainability claims with data, ideally verified by a third party like SGS
• Providing like-for-like product comparisons to avoid misleading consumers
• Genuinely incorporating sustainable practices, including reporting and disclosures, organization-wide
• Being honest about sustainability practices and plans
• Avoiding misleading wording and imagery

Verifying environmental claims

Organizations must not deceive to influence consumer buying or investor decisions. To create robust and transparent claims and reports, companies must gather sufficient evidence and data and look at verifying these through trusted third parties to increase accuracy and potency.

They must consider:

• Qualifications and disclosures
• Distinctions between the benefits of products, packaging and services
• Overstatements of environmental attributes
• Comparative claims

This is but an extract from our new greenwashing white paper.

About SGS

We are SGS – the world’s leading testing, inspection and certification company. We are recognized as the global benchmark for sustainability, quality and integrity. Our 99,600 employees operate a network of 2,600 offices and laboratories around the world.