A Greenwashing Glossary
A Greenwashing Glossary. Opening credits to the tune of ‘Car Wash’:
Greenwash, yeah!
Lemme tell you it’s always cool
And the boss don’t mind if you sometimes
Act the fool
1. GREENWASHING
Greenwashing usually means misleading customers, investors, or other stakeholders about the environmental impact of a product, policy, decision, or activity.
In the case of consumer products, consumer protection law can in theory limit greenwashing. In reality, unlawful greenwashing is rife: in 2021 the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network found that 42% of online green claims were false, deceptive and/or exaggerated. Last year the UK competition regulator published a Green Claims Code, and there’s talk of a clampdown.
When it comes to financial products, greenwashing is also a hot topic. When an investment is described as “green” or “sustainable” or “eco,” what does that actually mean? The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, and the new global International Sustainability Standards Board, are among those working on this problem, and both are currently seeking views. Bond markets have the Green Bond Principles, and the EU has the SFDR and more in the pipeline. But there is a lot to do, and work must develop quickly. We have yet to reach the point where asset managers, pension providers and other financial service companies have clear guidance about what they’re supposed to be doing — let alone credible monitoring and enforcement to ensure they do it.
Meanwhile, with the world mostly getting serious about climate transition, greenwashing grows more tempting, and the energy, imagination, and money poured into the art of greenwashing is on the rise. The greenwashing of the future may not be like the greenwashing of the past. Perhaps we’ll need a more varied vocabulary to describe all the tints of green? Below are a few suggestions …
2. ECO-SCUSE
An eco-scuse is when a company claims that some policy or decision is environmentally driven— when really it has some other driver. So there may actually be some environmental benefit, that’s not why they’re doing it.
Wait, you may say. If an action is aligned with climate transition, do the motives really matter? After all, the “real” motives for any decision can be mysterious. Sometimes even the person making the decision doesn’t know for sure. So what if it does reduce company costs — shouldn’t we just call that a useful synergy?
Fair enough, but an eco-scuse risks creating strange misconceptions about what effective climate action looks like: “You’re paying your subcontractor within 30 days? That’s very unethical of you!”
On the flip side, an eco-scuse risks undermining public confidence in climate transition, creating suspicion of a secret agenda behind every decision: “Oh, you’re switching to solar and wind to reduce your carbon footprint, are you? Sure you are, sure you are.”
Eco-scuses may also correlate with greenwashing, since it makes a company appear to be taking climate transition more seriously than it actually is.
Health and Safety makes a great comparison. The Health and Safety Executive used to have a wonderful site where baffled members of the public would write in with all the inconveniences and indignities they had endured in the name of Health and Safety. The HSE panel had the job of patiently explaining that, no, there is no law that says children can’t eat sandwiches outside, or that you can’t charge up your laptop in the public library, or banning you from the supermarket if you’ve got your fold-up bicycle with you.
Often it’s easier for someone to pretend that their hands are tied, rather than admit they have created the rule themselves.
3. GREENSQUASHING
A variation of the eco-scuse. When a company decides to stop doing something for supposedly green reasons, you can call that greensquashing.
“I’m afraid we no longer offer the two-for-one cocktails on a Thursday. The carbon footprint was too high.”
4. SUSTAINABABBLE
“Sustainability” + “babble” = sustainababble.
Sometimes this word is used to poke fun at the “cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool” (Engelman 2013).
It is true that sustainability is a word scarred by decades of compromise and equivocation. For many, sustainability just means taking a prudent and long-term view, to protect future financial performance. Sure, sustainability factors in ESG and climate risk management, because there is a business case to do so.
But to others, sustainability implies deeper transformation. It means understanding that you don’t surrender your ethics to company policy when you walk into the workplace. It means being part of a societal shift to a more enduring and morally just economic system, one that values all participants fairly, and one aligned with planetary boundaries.
So yes, the word sustainability is equivocal. It is also very widespread. For non-financial reporting, an overall sustainability framing is more common than CSR or ESG. And when it comes to reporting, the word is invariably given a more specific scope through the use of some standard (e.g. GRI).
However, even when reporting against a recognised standard, companies often provide information that is cherry-picked, imprecise, confusing, misleading, hard to navigate, or simply noncompliant. Third party assurance is still rare.
So a slightly different way of defining sustainababble could be by analogy with the technobabble you get on certain science fiction shows. When our heroes and their starship have been put in an impossible situation, suddenly our Chief Engineer has a brilliant idea — reverse the polarity of the subspace harmonics! — and saves the day.
Browse some corporate sustainability reporting, and you’ll soon come across information you simply don’t know how to interpret. It is natural to assume that somewhere there is an expert audience who is making use of this data to make relevant decisions, and/or to translate it for the relevant stakeholders. But is this really the case?
Sustainababble can prompt the same reaction as science fictional technobabble: “This information is intended for an expert, and I am not that expert, but I can appreciate the positive energy!” Whereas classic greenwashing might be about a company misleading a customer or investor, sustainababble is often more about the company confusing everybody, including itself, into thinking there is a plan.
(Sustainababble is also the name of an environmental podcast. Their Christmas special was called Sustainabauble, aww).
5. GREENWISHING
Also known as “Hopewashing.”
Standard greenwashing may be cynical or delusional, or a mix. By contrast, greenwishing is hardly ever cynical. Instead, greenwishing confuses “some progress” with “enough progress.”
Greenwishing is closely akin to sustainababble. But sustainababble is a hot mess of buzzwords and data without any clear audience. Greenwishing really does make meaningful disclosures about positive change, in ways audiences can understand. But it goes no further. It does not assess whether these actions cohere with scientific understandings of what is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, or address other aspects of environmental emergency. Greenwishers are content to assume that if they are doing everything they can, it must be enough. So they avoid the shocks that might lead to a deeper paradigm shift.
Here’s a serious question. Climate-related financial disclosures and other sustainability reporting is in flux. We’ve already mentioned the ISSB; the EU is also preparing its Climate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the first major update since the 2014 Non-Financial Reporting Directive, and there’s plenty more going on. Inspired by mainstream financial reporting, a new regulatory regime is emerging. It has plenty of tools to identify and address material misstatements and omissions. It won’t be easy, but it is at least conceivable how it can tackle the cynical greenwashing of the past.
Will the new regulatory regime have the tools to tackle the greenwashing of the future? Especially considering that the likes of eco-scuses, sustainababble, greenwishing may take particularly pernicious forms when the entity concerned really should exist in anything close to its current form? That is a very difficult thing to recognise about yourself.
OK, just a few more!
6. DECISION TREE-HUGGING: When a company endlessly collects data, runs models, consults decision support, and holds workshops, to identify the best possible climate action — all the while delaying any actual climate action.
7. GRIMWASHING: When a company is slow to act because of the (perhaps real and admirable) desire to safeguard the mental health of its stakeholders from the bleakness of climate change — without considering the future impacts on mental health that this slowness may contribute to.
8. GROANWASHING: When a company provides an exhausting level of detail about its environmental impacts, but the big picture is missing or waffly, and users aren’t given the tools and signposts to navigate and interpret the fine detail. Overlaps with sustainababble.
9. GRAINWASHING: Any unrealistic expectations around biofuels.
10. GREENMOSHING: Undue faith in markets or market-like mechanisms to deliver green outcomes, where little or no analysis has been done on the specific features of the market in question, to determine the credibility of such expectations. This one’s a bit unfair to moshing, sorry.
11. GREEN KNIGHT WASHING: Failing to hold individual leaders accountable (for example, a CEO), on the basis that if you cut the head off, it‘s not even going to make that much difference. This one’s a minor spoiler for the movie (and poem) The Green Knight, sorry.
12. GROOTWASHING. Overreliance on trees to save us. E.g. expectation that carbon offsetting markets can deliver more nature-based solutions than is feasible given the available planetary surface (implying trees in outer space).
13. ECO-NOCLAST: When your “blue sky thinking” is actually about burying your head in the sand. For example, when you love to attack sound environmental science using weak evidence or no evidence at all.
14. GREENWATCHING: Watching what’s going on around you and writing lots of Medium articles about it, without doing anything yourself.
Full disclosure: Apart from greenwashing and sustainabbabble, as far as I know, these terms were all invented here. I’m sure some of them have been invented many times and defined in different ways. Special thanks to Elena Dennison for suggesting eco-noclastic.
