The Sins of the 'Sins of Greenwashing'

The term "greenwash" may be a recent entrant to the lexicon, but it has already become a powerful weapon to use against corporates battling for environmental credibility. In this article, guest contributor David Flint takes issue with some of the assumptions and findings presented in one of the major reports on greenwashing. ICT players take note.

This is a very substantial study but it's important to be clear as to what the study did and did not do. TCEM did review claims for clarity and sense. And it did not, with one exception, check whether the claims were true. It did not, for instance, check whether firms claiming to use recycled materials were actually doing so.

Here's the exception, ten products made claims that were actually false (see Sin of Fibbing in table). Most of these were claims about certification, eg certified organic, that TCEM could not confirm. (And some of these may actually have been true - "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".)

This report is about green marketing - not green products or green behaviour - and identifies six sins of greenwashing (the title of the report).

But there are several ways in which TCEM itself commits these sins - or ones much like them. It treats 'green' as a synonym for good. It's excessively fussy. And it singles out environmental claims for faults that are endemic in marketing.

Treating green as a synonym for good

TCEM dilutes the impact of its work by using 'green' to mean the union of all virtues - ethical AND organic AND non-poisonous AND … This is a common practice in the environmental movement and is a potent source of confusion. It conflates solving the problem of climate change - a problem that threatens our civilisation - with issues which are little more than aesthetic. Or with issues like child labour which, though serious, don't actually threaten our survival. And which is not an environmental issue. Indeed, I have argued elsewhere that climate change is not an 'environmental' issue (see: http://climate-cassandra.blogspot.com/2007/11/global-warming-is-not-environmental.html ).

Thus in explaining the Sin of Lesser of Two Evils TCEM says that 17 products made true claims that it regards as objectionable, eg organic cigarettes and green insecticides. But I don't see anything wrong with these claims, assuming that they're clear and supported by evidence. The production and sale of cigarettes is an exercise in mass poisoning - but that's not an environmental issue.

Of course TCEM is right to recognise the multiple moral dimensions implicit in shopping (eg fair-trade, carbon emissions, child labour) but it's not helpful to call them all environmental. Ideally we need a standard format for an ethical scorecard - allowing customers to make their own trade-offs.

Indeed, even environment isn't a single issue. In describing the Sin of Hidden Trade-off  TCEM deplores claims about one aspect of environmental impact, eg energy efficiency, that ignore other aspects, such as hazardous material content. But why not? These things are different. Claims have to be specific and these are. Again we see the need for a standard ethical scorecard.

Excessive fuss

In other cases TCEM is simply too fussy. For example, it objects to claims that are true but not distinctive (The Sin of Irrelevance). I hold no brief for marketers but I'm much more concerned about false claims than about merely redundant ones.

Endemic faults

TCEM criticises companies for making claims that are meaningless or for which there was no supporting evidence. I agree that this is objectionable. Advertisers should, in my view, make only specific claims that they can prove - and I'd be quite strict about standards of proof. But it's clear that a large proportion of all marketing claims commit one or other of these sins.

The issue of truth