Greenwashing

What is greenwashing?

• The Exploitation. Some companies sell "natural" products like rainforest hardwoods or palm oil, or sell products that use these resources such as furniture, cosmetics, soap and others. Products such as these exploit native habitats and people. Products that indirectly cause exploitation are just as guilty.
  
  
• The Fix. Claims that a problem is fixed sometimes hide the fact that the fix itself is as bad as the original problem. This is frequently a delaying tactic as additional years of research may now be needed to determine the extent of the new problem. Colorado-base Newmont Mining Corporation's Batu Hijau gold mine in Indonesia is a case in point. Rather than disposing of their chemical processing effluent on land, Newmont pipes it 400 feet below sea level onto the sea floor.
  
  
• The Golden Child. I'm doing everything right (but my supply chain isn't.) Claiming ignorance of what your suppliers are doing is a form of greenwashing.
  
  
• The Irrelevant Truth. Claiming that a product is green because it doesn't have something that it wouldn't have anyway. Claiming a glass product is BPA-free, for example.
  
  
• The Lie. This is the most obvious, the easiest to discover, and probably generates the most negative responses on average. When a company flat-out lies it's often discovered quickly and word spreads like wildfire on the web, but companies still do this all the time, and many of them get away with it for a while.
  Here are a few examples. Claims that a product...
  • is organic when it is not
  • saves money when it doesn't
  • has a return on investment that turns out to be longer than the lifetime of the product
  • improves gas mileage, but destroys the engine
  
  
• The Magic Transformation. Claiming that a product or service is suddenly green when nothing has changed. A business that refills ink cartidges is no more green than it was a year ago when it did not use the "green" label.
  
  
• The Obfuscation. Misleading labeling, misleading claims, and misleading science. Misleading labeling for food products purporting to be healthy is one of the most pervasive issues for food items. Even Federally-regulated common-usage phrases such as "organic" vary based on product type and overseeing authority, and many phrases in common use are entirely unregulated. The unfortunate result is that many companies mislead or lie about these labels. Some phrases such as "kosher" and "fair trade certified" are regulated by trustworthy third-parties.
  
  
• The Redirect. Reframing the conversation to try to convince people that what they're doing is harmless, that there is no proof, or that the proof is not credible. Prime examples here are Newmont's claim that dumping its effluent only harms some "sea insects" and industry-funded studies showing that there is no climate change.
  
  
• The Single Focus. It's green because this one thing is green. Because a company uses all natural spring water does not make it green, or even healthy, if you put it into a plastic bottle.