Rinse your mouth, it's Greenwash!
August 21 2008 / by jcchan / In association with Future Blogger.net
Category: Environment Year: 2008 Rating: 3
Going green is a noble cause. Both corporations and consumers are picking up on the trend due to market pressure. There’s no question about it, buyers like me feel warm and fuzzy when they purchase a product that is truly both sustainable and Eco-friendly.
But although this movement has grand intentions, it is not without its demons. After all, how can you tell if a product is really Eco-friendly or if the manufacturer just wants to make a quick buck? Enter Greenwashing, the practice of tricking consumers into believing a product to be green.
Examples of this practice include slapping a nice palm tree on a bottle of corrosive chemicals or being ambiguous about their environmental claims. Increasingly, greenwashing is a growing trend that any informed consumer must watch out for.
In the GE Ecomagination commercial below, the company portrays a mining operation with sexy and slender miners having fun with the pick-axes and drilling machines. The message is that energy from coal is getting more beautiful because of GE’s emissions reducing technology. It is an abundant resource that’s for sure, with an estimated supply of 250 years.
But many of us know that coal is the dirtiest burning fossil fuel, releasing hefty amounts of sulfur-oxides that produces acid rain and greenhouse emissions. Coal extraction is also a brutal process that severely scars the environment from strip mining and unthinkable amounts of toxic sludge (read: Thousands of tons). So what does a company like GE have in their bag of tricks that would make coal a viable candidate for all our future power needs?
According to the Rainforest Action Network the correct answer is: nothing. CCS, or Carbon Capture and Storage is the idea of filtering and extracting the pollutants from burned coal emissions, liquefying it, and storing it underground forever.
The technology will not be viable for at least another ten years, and even then it still may not work. Even if it does function properly, the idea of storing liquefied toxic goo forever on a large scale in mountains and caves within the Earth’s tender crust plates doesn’t sound all that future realistic.
Thus, GE and a host of other global giants welcome you to generation greenwash – an era of corporate hypocrisy intended to win over the green in your wallet with green propaganda.
For example, you may have seen the recent Dow “Human Element” commercials or seen their ads in magazines.
It is a beautiful commercial with poetic imagery of ethnic peoples and a message that Dow chemicals may be as essential as the people inhabiting this planet. Dow even has stunning photographs in magazine ads from Steve McCurry (of the famous photograph Nat Geo “Afghan Girl” fame). It seems that Dow really wants to get down and meet “high standards for environmental and social responsibility” as they say on their website.
But perhaps Dow just wants the public to forget that they hold responsibility for the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984 – Dow now owns Union Carbide, of which owned a pesticide factory near the densely populated city of Bhopal. To this day, the incident has been largely ignored by the press, the Indian government, and Dow company leaders.
Another good campaign of public deception is Fiji Water, a prime example of greenwashing with their exotic bottles of bright green palm trees and slogan “Every Drop is Green”. To really understand what the trust cost is of a bottle of Fiji, lets this list from The American Public Media’s Greenwash Brigade tell the story.
Manufactured luxury by the numbers:
• 5,500 miles per trip from Fiji to Los Angeles (the closest Fiji Water destination point in the US)
• 46 million gallons of fossil fuel
• 1.3 billion gallons of water
• 216,000,000 lbs of greenhouse gases
(per year)
Of course, it’s not just water bottling companies, GE, and Dow that greenwash their brands:
-Starbucks: Their failure to uphold fair trade standards despite a campaign of being a fair-trade coffee company.
-Mattel Toy Company: For releasing an Eco-conscious line of Barbie dolls made from recycled Barbie parts when all of it’s toys are already made of petroleum.
-GM: Their Hybrid Trucks magazine ads consist of a picture of a big leaf, perhaps trying to distract readers from the fine print. GM supports E85 ethanol fuel, which uses as much resources to grow as it does to fuel your car. GM’s Malibu Hybrid is only 2 mpg better than the original and the Tahou, 3 mpg.
But there is hope. Media watchdogs and consumers are beginning to educate themselves to detect greenwashing, and ultimately that should force the corporate behemoths to change their ways or suffer the market consequences. After all, it is the ultimately the consumer that drives the country and shapes the future.
For more information on this emerging trend, check out the Six Sins of Greenwashing to watch out for and this top ten list of America’s worst greenwashers.
Comment Thread (4 Responses)
-
Great post! I love your examples and analysis. Greenwashing is something I am passionate about exposing. If environmental consumerism is ever going to really work, we will have to be as knowledgeable about it as we are about nutrition, I think. But I am skeptical that will ever happen.
Posted by: Mielle Sullivan August 22, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend -
Mielle, have some faith in the myriad rapidly evolving distributed semantic and social quantification techniques and process that will break down corporate behavior to neat little increments… :) while at the same time quantifying everything that we might not want quantified.
Posted by: Alvis Brigis August 22, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend -
jcchan, given accelearting change, where do you think greenwashing is headed?
Posted by: Alvis Brigis August 22, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend -
I would like to think that sooner or later, a law will be passed on the reliability of infomation that companies advertise to customers. An international standard that enforces the unadulterated truth and bans greenwash. I hope there will be something like that because greenwash will only get more and more provalent in society.
Posted by: jcchan August 25, 2008
Vote for this comment - Recommend