How To Spot Greenwashing
A guide to detecting false eco-friendly claims
Have you ever seen an ad with the background showing a country landscape, a green-packaged product in the center, and then bright (green) letters appear, showing you how healthy and sustainable the brand selling that product is?
I’ll give you a hint. Perhaps it was Coca-Cola pledging to be environmentally friendly, or maybe McDonald's with the recyclable paper straws, or the sustainable fabrics by the fashion brand H&M.
The next weeks you read the news and in the headlines, it appears NGO Sues Coca Cola for Greenwashing (FREE), as well as this one Of course McDonald’s paper straws can’t be recycled — it’s yet another corporate greenwash, and let’s not forget that one Fast Fashion: Its Detrimental Effect on the Environment.
If you first believed that these advertisements were telling the truth, I hate to break it to you my friend, but you’ve been a victim of greenwashing — and you are not alone.
According to the International Consumer Protection Enforcement Network, up to 40% of environmentally friendly claims might be misleading customers.
Greenwashing is a marketing strategy, stamping something as being organic, 100% natural, and eco-friendly when in reality it’s not true. Companies use greenwashing to make their brand more appealing to customers that innocently think they are contributing to the planet without knowing they actually are being misled.
Greenwashing has a significant financial incentive attached to it. In a survey carried out by Nielsen, 66% of consumers would spend more on a product if it comes from a sustainable brand — among millennials, it’s 73%.
We know why they do it and now it’s time to learn how to stop greenwashing.
Follow this 5-step guide and discover whether your favorite ‘eco-friendly’ brands are committed to the environment… or are scams.
1. Vague language. From labels like ‘certified green’ and ‘earth friendly’ to the use of scientific jargon.
Changing the color of the product’s packaging and adding special stamps so you can see it stand out in the shelters of a supermarket does not mean that the brand is ecologically conscious.
Make sure that in the description of the product there are no scientific idioms such as maltose, isoglucose, edible lactose — those all mean ‘added sugar’.
Example? Coca-Cola.
To move away from the growing concerns about their unhealthy beverages, they launched the low-calories, naturally sweetened, Coca-Cola Life which is actually made of high fructose corn syrup.
By drinking this you’ll get less life I am afraid.
2. Disinformation campaigns and false claims about green solutions to change the audience’s focus.
A company announcing in press releases that it promotes sustainable ideas and is in the process of making their brand able to reach ‘net-zero’ while at the same time polluting at a higher rate than any other competitor is a deal-breaker.
Essentially, be suspicious about products that claim to be green, yet rely on mass production and consumption.
The best example is ExxonMobil, a fossil fuel giant along with Chevron, BP, and Shell. The corporation is advertising misleading information about its real effects on climate change by proposing that its experimental algae biofuels will — one day — help to achieve its 2025 emission reduction targets.
Their plan, by the way, does not reduce the vast majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from its main products.
3. Hiding unfavorable information about the brand’s manufacturing, distribution, and product end-of-life.
Lack of transparency regarding the entire supply chain, from the beginning to the very end, is the best way to detect greenwashing — especially in fast fashion brands. Not all are bad, though.
Ethical and environmentally-safe brands will devote a section of their webpage to inform you about the provenance of their clothes, where are they manufactured, which fabrics they use, what are the working conditions, and whether they cause environmental degradation in the local area.
Otherwise, they will provide you with a brief description full of positive words but little about the aspects mentioned above.
If you’re struggling to find environmental information about a company, take that as a warning sign.
Want examples? The list is long but the most controversial is the cheaply produced clothes of the fast-fashion brand H&M — only 0.7% of recycled textiles are used, the rest are synthetic materials.
If it was cheaply produced for you, the consumer, who do you think pays the true price for these low-cost clothes? Often young women and children are the ones manufacturing fast fashion apparel in dangerous working conditions for low pay.
Nowadays there are websites where you type the kind of clothes you want — tops, jeans, blouses, the choice is yours! It will show you an array of options from sustainable brands with all the necessary information.
Don’t you believe me? Check out Project Cece and you’ll see how they measure the environmental impact of the hundreds of brands they have listed.
4. Look out for carbon offsetting. Highlighting their environmental contributions outside without fixing their company.
Another popular form of greenwashing is seeking other ways to remove an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases from their own emissions. Companies drive the attention to another good cause instead of solving the problem itself.
They are not concerned about cutting down their emissions, they want to be the poster child of sustainability and continue selling.
Volkswagen put up a façade of sustainability years ago that eventually fell apart. They cheated in the greenhouse gas emissions test by adding a type of software into their engines that could detect when they were being tested for emissions and adjust them to be lower than they regularly were.
But what was their response?
“We’ve totally screwed up,” said VW America boss Michael Horn while the group’s chief executive at the time, Martin Winterkorn, said his company had “broken the trust of our customers and the public.”
5. Is the product and its packaging recyclable? The fact that the recyclable label on an item is present does not mean it’s true.
Since 1950, we have produced 8,300 million metric tons of plastic. Half of it has been generated in the last 13 years and only 9 percent is recyclable. Most of the plastic is made of fossil fuels because it’s cheaper easier to create than other methods.
These are called single-use plastics. The ones that cause a huge carbon footprint, turn into microplastics entering the food chain from the bottom to the top (yeah, you also eat it), and stay with us for hundreds of years.
You might remember the controversy back in 2019 when McDonald’s introduced paper straws that turned out to be non-recyclable.
Or as an everyday example, Starbucks. Although they do not give you straws, the ‘paper cups’ that contain your Frappuccino, tea, and cold coffee are made up of only 10% recycled fiber. The cups are lined with polyethylene to keep the drink contained and can break down into microplastics when thrown away. This coating is the reason why it’s so hard for the cups to be recycled so they usually end up in a landfill.
And honestly, even if most companies have now banned straws to reduce ocean pollution, it is like saying that deforestation in the Amazon can be stopped by banning toothpicks.
Bottom Line: What Can You Do?
Despite the current movement of climate awareness, most people continue to buy these greenwashed products — either because it is more convenient or they are not informed. The hyper-consumption-based society we live in makes companies believe they can keep up their operations business as usual.
You, who cares about the planet, now know that things to pay attention to detect a greenwashed brand. But what’s next?
- Instead of buying these products, research other brands that are actually dedicated to embracing environmentalist practices.
- Buy fewer clothes or shop for secondhand items.
- When deciding to buy new, research businesses that communicate clearly about their ethical and sustainable production lines on their websites.
Final recommendation?
Keep an eye well open for greenwashing, and let the knowledge you have gained empower you to make better decisions about what you purchase.
Thanks for reading!
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