Category | Arts & Living

Washed up: Many companies guilty of greenwashing products, services

Published on September 23, 2008 by The Sentinel

   The greenwashing is getting out of control.  I cannot drive down the
road, go online or watch TV without being pelted by advertising
promising products or services that are “green,” “eco-friendly,” or,
and this is my favorite, “earth lite.”

   
    Call me a skeptic, but I highly doubt that practically every company has developed sustainable business practices, and it turns out I have good reason to be: A 2007 study by environmental marketing firm TerraChoice found that 99 percent of “green” product claims are misleading. TerraChoice then went on to identify the Six Sins of Greenwashing .

    While all six are equally heinous, the most insidious is the Sin of Irrelevance. Companies commit this sin when they emphasize their greenness over that of other companies, although every other company can make the same claim about their product or service. For example, my drive to KSU takes me past a billboard advertising a so-called green plumber. This company, the billboard shouts, is green because they install tankless water heaters. Nevermind that tankless water heaters were invented just after World War II and that the plumbing company I temped with in 2005 installed them regularly. Thank goodness we finally have ourselves a green plumber here in Atlanta (yes, that is a note of sarcasm you detect).

    Take a small local bank as another example. Browsing an eco-website a few months back, I came across a banner ad for a “green bank.”  Curious, I clicked on the ad, only to find that the features of green banking include the heretofore-unknown online banking. This simple but not-so-new service enables customers to receive statements via email rather than snail mail and to pay bills from home to reduce those carbon emissions. It all sounds great unless you have patronized a bank before (or have seen one of their ad spots), in which case you know that online banking has been a common practice for years.

    So who are these companies anyway? I purposefully decided not to call them out by name because, despite committing the Sin of Irrelevance, their little corporate hearts might very well be in the right place. (Well, except for the nationwide cable company that now calls their online bill pay service “EcoBill” even though it’s identical to their old bill pay service in every way. Shame on them.)  Or, more likely, if these local greenwashers are not currently putting their money where their mouth is, I believe they will in the future.  As it turns out, like greenwashing, environmentalism is insidious, too.  Even if a company starts out simply cashing in on a trend, once it gazes into the crisis, the crisis gazes back. My prediction, which may be overly optimistic, is that no matter how many greenbacks the new advertising campaign brings in, most plumbers will not be driving around in monster trucks for much longer—unless the trucks run on biodiesel.

    Until I see some tangible proof of change from these sinful greenwashers, though, I plan to continue railing against any company that misleads the public.