Sabine gives the seven sins of greenwashing in a 17 min. YouTube video. The text follows.
1. The Sin of the Hidden Tradeoff:: When a product is marketed as green based on some environmental benefit but other often bigger issues go unmentioned. A typical example is batteries for electric vehicles. They don’t release CO2 emissions when in use but their production has a carbon footprint and often causes air and water pollution. Calling them zero emissions is fine; calling them zero pollution is greenwashing.
2. The Sin of No Proof :: The product’s environmental claim is just words and not supported by publicly available information or third party tests. A typical example is that a product is 100% biodegradable but that number is just guesswork rather than an actual test result.
3. The Sin of Vagueness:: Claims that sound good but mean nothing. Like the phrase ‘all natural’. Arsenic, for example, is all natural, but is neither good for the environment nor for you. Or the ‘climate positive’ label that you can find on some products. It’s supposed to mean it’s taking more CO2 out of the atmosphere than it produces, which can be said about any plant, so long as it grows. And if it’s not a plant, who checked if it’s true?
4. The Sin of Irrelevance:: Claims that are correct, but don’t matter. A typical example is labeling a product as free of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), which destroy the ozone layer. That’s nice and the label surely looks good but these chemicals are banned by law anyway.
5. The Sin of Lesser of Two Evils:: This is when a claim may be true within a category, but the category itself is not environmentally friendly. For example a fuel efficient SUV may well be more environmentally friendly than that of another company, but that doesn’t mean either of them is particularly good for the environment.
6. The Sin of Fibbing (small lies):: A typical example is that paper or plastic is made from 100% recycled materials. In many, if not most cases a substantial part of the supposedly recycled materials come from industrial waste, not from consumer waste; that is a 100% recycled bottle might largely be made of plastic that was discarded at some factory. Now that’s still an improvement over burning the stuff, but the label didn’t mean what you think it means, does it? So Fibbing.
7. The Sin of Worshipping False Labels:: Just download a few green labels and tack them onto your product. If the consumers don’t know what to look out for, these labels can look very similar to reliable certification labels. And if that wasn’t enough, you could just make the whole thing green.
