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Greenwashing: Separating Fact from Hype

Today’s consumers are overloaded with advertising and communications promoting environmentally-friendly goods and services.

Many experts agree that it’s in a company’s best interest to tout environmental initiatives, yet marketers face a challenge in how to best state their claims without overstating their impact. Here’s an inside look at facing this challenge.

As environmental awareness and interest in eco-friendly products has piqued in recent years, so have green claims by marketers. This has led to an increased awareness of greenwashing across industries.

A combination of the words “green” and “whitewash,” the term greenwashing was coined in the late 1980s to describe misleading claims deliberately designed to enhance or distort an organization’s environmental position.

“Greenwashing is bad because it leads to skepticism and cynicism on the part of consumers, who already are trying to balance their desire to ‘buy green’ with their innate suspicions of companies’ authenticity and sincerity,” says Joel Makower, executive editor, GreenBiz.com, and author of Strategies for the Green Economy. “And it leads to a false sense of security—that we can shop our way to environmental health.”

Shades of Green

Joel Makower

Spotting greenwashing often depends on how you define it, says Makower. "There’s very little outright fraud. What's more prevalent is sloppiness and overreaching, where companies make bigger claims than they should make, or make claims that aren’t well documented, or simply engage in hyperbole. In most cases, these are committed by well-meaning companies who just don’t take the time to put things in perspective, or to do their homework about what makes for believable environmental marketing claims."

Validating Green Claims

The proliferation of green marketing hype is due in part to a lack of standards. A variety of groups monitor green claims in advertising, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The FTC is in the process of updating its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, also known as the Green Guides. Last reviewed in 1998—before terms such as “sustainable” and “carbon-neutral” were popular—the guides are intended to help marketers avoid making unfair or deceptive environmental claims.

“We’ve been holding workshops on a number of green marketing topics,” says Janice Frankle, attorney in the division of enforcement at the FTC. “The first one in January was on carbon offsets. Then we had one in April on packaging claims and a third workshop in July on green building and textile claims. Information about all of these is available on our website.”

Marketing Green

For marketers, greenwashing is a tricky road to navigate. While many experts agree that it’s in a company’s best interest to tout eco-friendly initiatives, overstated claims may be viewed as greenwashing. Makower suggests being specific, providing proof and putting things in context.

“Consumers are looking for ‘good’ and ‘green’ companies from which to buy, but they understand that no company can be really green, so they’re willing to accept imperfect products from imperfect companies—if the company is honest with them and doesn’t try to convince them that buying their product will ‘save the earth.’ Consumers know that it won’t, and that engenders distrust.”