Warning: This “green” label may cause the customer anxiety, blurred vision, severe headaches or dizziness, an exaggerated sense of well-being, yawning, irritability, and/or a decreased desire to save the Earth.  Wikipedia defines greenwashing as the practice of companies disingenuously spinning their products and policies as environmentally friendly, such as by presenting cost cuts as reductions in use of resources.  It is a deceptive use of green PR or green marketing. The term green sheen has similarly been used to describe organizations that attempt to show that they are adopting practices beneficial to the environment. 

A recently cited article for example about Comcast’s ecobill has the slogan of “PaperLESSisMORE” but ComCast uses large amounts of paper for direct marketing. The Poland Spring ecoshape bottle is touted as “A little natural does a lot of good”, although 80% of beverage containers go to the landfill.  Kohler plumbing fixture ads have very different messages with their National Geographic ads touting water efficiency, while their Wired ads feature a nine-headed water-hog shower.

Daniel Goldman’s new book, Ecological Intelligence, urges us to look beyond the greenwashing claims of the marketing industry and his book takes a holistic approach, following products from the extraction of raw materials, the industrial processes that make a product, packaging, transporting, time in store, even what happens while you use it, and then disposal. His book champions the emerging discipline of industrial ecology using a method called life-cycle assessment (LCA), the history of each product can be revealed, with surprising results.  “The industrial ecologists render precise metrics for impacts on the environment, on our health and on the wellbeing of those who labour to make our stuff,” says Goleman.

He cites the example of the humble glass pasta jar, which in fact has 1,959 discrete steps in its development process, each of which has myriad impacts, from carbon costs and water use to the wellbeing of the workers who make it.  “We are making glass and concrete in the same way we did 100 years ago when we didn’t know about this stuff,” he says. “We still make glass by heating silica and a batch of chemicals to about 1,100 degrees for 24 hours – a method that dates from the 1850s.”

Rather than rely on organizations and individuals to reduce the impact of greenwashing, companies like Levi Strauss & Co. conducted a full LCA on their top-selling products and found that one of the phases with the most negative environmental impact was during use, when users wash their jeans. As a result, Levi Strauss is communicating to customers—through their labels, promotions, and store staff—that the jeans should be washed in cold water. This is a case in which the company is using LCA and communications in order to improve their products’ environmental performance.

This is a critical period for reshaping the relationship between business and society. Trust in corporations has plummeted, and business has a key role in shaping whether that trust will continue to diminish, or instead be reshaped.

By Warren White
Waller & Associates, LLC
www.WallerAssoc.com