Greenwashing

 

It can be highly beneficial for companies across a variety of sectors to promote that they’re friendly for the environment.  Some companies abuse the occasional gaps in legislations to lay dubious or vague claims to sustainability.

Greenwashing can be defined as

“the selective disclosure of positive information without full disclosure of negative information so as to create an overly positive corporate image”  (Lyon and Maxwell, 2011)  

According to this definition, almost everyone is guilty of greenwashing. When someone wants to sell something the person will obviously not stress the negative aspects, which are always there.

A more specific description is  “The term for ads and labels that promise more environmental benefit than they deliver” (Dahl 2010, p. A247)  

A report from 2010 concluded that 95% of products that were advertised as green were guilty of some form of greenwashing.To what degree is the marketing around the BBE guilty of this? When a company is exaggerating specific environmental claims in a too obvious way this can lead to a negative public image due to people on social media who seek to unmask these claims. (Bowen and Aragon-Correa 2014, p108) Can governments be guilty of greenwashing too? Possibly in large projects or investments: e.g. the energy plants that were recently build in the Netherlands, and that are using coal: the clean aspects were emphasized when comparing to the more old-fashioned power plants.

 

The mechanisms of greenwashing

The most important reasons for greenwashing are a lack of strict regulations in combination with deliberate vagueness, to avoid the existing legislation. One of the results is public confusion. 

Companies with a reputation of polluting have little to lose when making green claims. Companies who have a clean reputation sometimes choose to be quiet about their innocence, for the risk of being attacked.  (Dahl 2010, p. A250) 

The dangerous consequences of greenwashing include the devaluing of actual green claims: 

"if consumers get so skeptical that they don’t believe any green claims. […] Then we’ve lost an incredibly powerful tool for generating environmental improvements.” (Dahl 2010, p. A252) 

Another problem is that people often do not  understand the labbeling which should make it easier for consumers to make healthier of more conscious choices. The Dutch consumers association therefore started a campaign to get rid of some of these labels.