## 4.4 Greenwashing

Greenwashing is the general term for deceptive practices that present a company or its products as more environmentally friendly, more socially responsible, more ethical, and/or more sustainable than it actually is. Since environmental movements became popular in the 1960s and early 1970s companies have responded by ‘jumping on the green bandwagon’ in their advertising and promotion. The term ‘green washing’ was coined in 1986, to differentiate misleading environmental claim from the general misleading claims and overstatements that characterize modern marketing. In 2002 companies like ExxonMobil and BP but also the US Government were awarded for their elaborate greenwashing practices, as they spent vast amounts of money on presenting themselves as environmentally conscious rather than on research and policies that would actually reduce their levels of pollution. Since then the amount of greenwashing has gone up rather than down (Lyon & Montgomery, 2015).

Greenwashing can take many forms, like deceptive advertising, green spinning, or creative accounting. Greenwashing by deceptive advertising ranges from irrelevant and misleading claims to outright falsehoods (Carlson, Grove, & Kangun, 1993; Kangun, Carlson, & Grove, 1991). Green spinning covers public relation and press releases that employ a range of rhetorical techniques to either overstate a company’s sustainable activities or understate a company’s non-sustainable performance (Lyon & Montgomery, 2015). In environmental accounting environmental impacts are reduced to measurable parameters that can be attenuated, for example by recalculating and increasing past impacts (showing an improvement for current impacts), by reporting relative impact if this improves compared to absolute impact due to production increase, or by reporting absolute impact if this is more beneficial due to a decline in production (Lippert). Recently also technological greenwashing has caught the attention thanks to the Volkswagen Diesel scandal, where specific software was built into cars to minimise their emission under standardised test conditions rather than under real traffic conditions.

Though greenwashing may seem profitable for companies in the short term it evidently undermines consumer trust, and without consumer trust sustainable marketing doesn’t stand a chance to succeed (Nuttavuthisit & Thøgersen, 2017).

(Author Chapter 4.4: Dr. Ynte van Dam, Wageningen University)

Greenwashing: False Claims on Recycling, Sustainability and Eco Friendly Products https://youtu.be/1QUKuA4Obcw

Are Aluminium Water Bottles better? https://youtu.be/UX56b9BmV80

References Chapter 4.4

Carlson, L., Grove, S.J., & Kangun, N. (1993). A content analysis of environmental advertising claims: A matrix method approach. Journal of advertising, 22(3), 27-39.

Kangun, N., Carlson, L., & Grove, S.J. (1991). Environmental advertising claims: a preliminary investigation. Journal of public policy & marketing, 47-58.

Lippert, I. Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions. https://opus.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/opus4/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2199.

Lyon, T.P., & Montgomery, A.W. (2015). The means and end of greenwash. Organization & Environment, 28(2), 223-249.

Nuttavuthisit, K., & Thøgersen, J. (2017). The importance of consumer trust for the emergence of a market for green products: The case of organic food. Journal of Business Ethics, 140(2), 323-337.