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As eco-friendly products become more desired by consumers, it grows harder to distinguish genuine sustainable products from those that are simply posing as “green” in order to entice customers to buy them. Greenwashing, which has been an increasing occurrence in the past decade, is the action of making false or misleading claims about a company’s practices or products being environmentally friendly.
“I think that there has been a shift in what consumers are prioritizing, Kate Stamey, president of the Tualatin High Climate Change Activism Club, commented. “A lot of people are looking for products that aren’t harming the environment and they are willing to pay slightly more to feel that they are combating the climate crisis with their purchasing decisions.”
Greenwashing comes in many forms. It can be a larger scandal, such as when Volkswagen was charged with installing software that allows their vehicles to cheat EPA emissions tests back in 2015, after marketing them as “clean diesel” cars. At the same time, greenwashing can also be something as simple as misleading packaging. For instance, a product may appear in packaging with natural imagery in order to mimic sustainable brands. This kind of packaging can be misleading to consumers, and lead to profit that comes from disingenuous claims or marketing decisions. This is extremely common among plastic water bottle companies, which are major contributors to plastic pollution.
Other forms of greenwashing include the use of buzzwords, such as “natural” or “eco-friendly,” that don’t fully explain why a product is labeled as such. Last year, H&M faced a lawsuit based on their “conscious choice” line of products. It was claimed that the use of words like “sustainable” were used to mislead customers. The charges were dismissed; however, there was also an investigation published by Quartz, a news website with a focus on business, that accused H&M of having misleading information on their environmental scorecards, which were supposed to display facts like how much water or fossil fuels were used to make a piece of clothing. H&M removed these cards from their website after the investigation was published.
Other companies will use new, eco-friendly initiatives to draw attention away from their more harmful practices, or create climate pledges that rely too heavily on carbon-offsets, which do not always have guaranteed impacts.
Constant greenwashing results in consumers being more skeptical of every eco-friendly claim, which leads to even legitimate green products not being taken seriously. Along with this, when a company uses tools such as misleading marketing or hiding behind new environmentally-friendly initiatives, it allows the company to continue their environmentally damaging practices while still garnering the benefits that genuine eco-friendly companies get.
“This both takes away profits from businesses that are actually operating with climate impacts in mind and disincentivizes companies from making real and meaningful changes to their practices,” Stamey said.
This also makes genuine, eco-friendly companies less likely to be discovered by the public, which keeps consumers from finding good alternatives to the environmentally-damaging products that currently dominate the industry.
