Greenwashing

And our eroded trust

You have probably developed some strange behaviors while in quarantine, I’ve been at home now for almost three months and there are definitely some peculiar new habits being created in this household. Since I now spend more time here, I’ve started listening to documentaries as I cook lunch for my husband — when it is my turn of course, since this is an equal rights space! -. Last week was no different in that sense, but the outcome in my mindset was completely opposite than normal. I watched/listened to a documentary that left me in tears. Granted, I cry from videos of cute puppies and racoons being rescued published on social media, but this was nothing alike. The film in question left me out of breath, profoundly discouraged and heartbroken. It has been a week and I can’t shake the pain of a scene in which you can see a beautiful jungle being cut down as an orangutan tries to escape the destruction. Even as I write these lines, emotion overwhelms me. The movie was about Greenwashing.

What does it mean?

“Environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term “greenwashing” in a 1986 essay criticizing hotels for saying they were “green” just because they offered guests the option of reusing towels. Today, communication that misleads consumers about a company’s environmental record or the eco-benefits of products or services usually gets tagged as -Greenwashing-.”1 Basically what that means is that if a company or organization is making exaggerated or false claims of a sustainable impact their products or services have, they are greenwashing.

We are surrounded by advertisements that promote what they say to be sustainable, “eco-friendly” and other unspecified, unmeasured, unverified claims. These tactics are used to alleviate our conscience and convince us to consume shiny new products that we believe have a small or no impact at all on Mother Earth. They take advantage of the fact that we are looking to choose for brands that have positive impacts in our societies and embrace sustainability, and it is working. “Indeed, one recent report revealed that certain categories of products with sustainability claims showed twice the growth of their traditional counterparts.”2

Eroded trust

As marketing experts get more and more effective at selling us products and services that falsely claim sustainability, our societies and the planet pay the true cost. Moreover, when we find out the truth and see that our best efforts to use better products and our trust in “eco-friendlier” services have been for nothing, we run the risk of choosing to stop trying. As, apparently, experts are not to be trusted. Because, who has the time to look for the full impact reports of the “sustainable” toilet paper you bought last week? And even if you did, would it be true? And if it was, would you be able to understand all of the claims? The task of effectively proofread every little item we purchase seems daunting.

Certain initiatives have been created to help us navigate this challenge, most notably I would say, sustainability certifications. They are mostly used as labels that guarantee that a product or service complies with specific measures. “Eco-labels are indications on a product, given by an impartial third party, that explicitly convey the non-market value of a good or service in terms of its environmental impact. They are critical for raising environmental awareness, fostering sustainable consumption and assisting consumers (both business and individual) in identifying green products and services and thus promoting their demand and supply.”3 They are available for pretty much everything and in all industries. However, certification initiatives have proliferated to the point where now many brands have their own “certifications”. In most cases these self assessments are completely bogus. It is basically the equivalent to boardrooms of people telling each other their products and services are amazing without having a transparent way of communicating what they are measuring (if they are measuring anything in the first place!), how they are doing it or having any sort of third party verifications. Relying only on self assessments makes it very easy for companies to greenwash their image as there is no independent control of their claims. We are bombarded with these reasonably-sounding claims until someone pushes too far and has to take their words back. In 2008, Nestle Waters Canada said that “Bottled water is the most environmentally responsible consumer product in the world.”? What they failed to mention at the time is the massive impact their plastic bottles have on the environment and how many of the company’s bottle water subdivisions extract water from regions which have been in a state of drought for years. At that time the company faced complaints from multiple local environmental groups, but little changed in the long term, as bottled water continues to be everywhere.

The first label appeared in 1988 as a coffee brand sold in the Netherlands was certified with the Fairtrade label. Today there companies like Ecolabel are “tracking 457 ecolabels in 199 countries, and 25 industry sectors”?. Ecolabel aims to provide guidance for the different available sustainability labels across the world. They say “this unique platform collects and structures data on ecolabels globally, increasing transparency and helping buyers and sellers use them more effectively”? However most of their content is paid which means that we, normal people, can’t easily rely on systems like theirs to ensure the labels on our products are actually sustainable.

As a whole, this, once gain brings us to a sense of distrust and lack of transparency. As companies seem to continue to make consumers responsible for making the right choices I wonder why they seem to be making it harder for us to make those right decisions. “Unilever estimates that almost 70% of its greenhouse gas footprint depends on which products customers choose and whether they use and dispose of them in a sustainable manner — for example, by conserving water and energy while doing the laundry or recycling containers properly after use.”? Statements like that make us directly responsible for problems like global warming, but everyone I spoke to said they would choose to not pollute the environment if they knew how to choose truly sustainable products.

Furthermore, a report called “Natural Capital at Risk: The top 100 Externalities of Business” published by Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by the United Nations Environmental Program, which examined the money earned by the biggest industries on the planet against their environmental costs. They analyzed 100 types of environmental costs organizing them into 6 categories: water use, land use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste pollution, land pollution, and water pollution. Concluding that

“none of the region/sectors with the highest impacts generate a sufficient return to cover their environmental costs”?

That means that if the companies profiting from these products and services they produce were to also cover the environmental costs of what they sell, they will no longer be profitable. They would be constantly losing money.

How is this possible? You might think by now that I’m a bit obsessed with the answer I’m going to give, but bare with me. I think it is only possible because of lack of transparency. I said it once and I’ll say it again, I have never met anyone who is actively looking to destroy our planet and intoxicate their family and kill their dog. When we are able to see the true information about a product or a service, when we see the full picture we make the best decisions we can at that moment in time. The best we can do is to ask for companies and governments to respect our right to know.

[1] The Green to Gold Business Playbook. How to implement Sustainability Practices for Bottom-line Results in Every Business Function (ESTY, Daniel C. and SIMMONS, P.J., 2011)

[2] The Elusive Green Consumer (Harvard Business Review, 2019)

[3] Low Carbon Green Growth Roadmap for Asia and the Pacific, Fact Sheet, Eco-Labeling

[4] The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing (The Guardian, 2016)

[5][6] Ecolabel Index (2020)

[7] The Elusive Green Consumer (Harvard Business Review, 2019)

[8] Natural Capital at Risk: The top 100 externalities of business (Trucost, 2013)