Watch Out for Green Wash
23 May 2008
‘Green-ness’ is big business these days.
Recent surveys have shown that concern for our environment is having an increasing impact on the sorts of products we choose to buy. And don’t think that companies haven’t noticed this trend; advertising with an environmentally friendly twist now seems to be the way to get us to buy more stuff, from supermarket food to the petrol we put in our cars.
It is often difficult to tell the difference between reliable and misleading advertising claims. Businesses will go to extraordinary lengths to convince us of their eco-credibility and unfortunately many of the things we see are simply untrue; this is known as ‘green wash’. So how can you tell if something is green wash or not?
The annual report from the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) shows that the number of complaints lodged, relating to environmental or green claims, has more than quadrupled in the past year. Despite this dramatic rise, ‘green wash’ is not just something that has recently become an issue.
Debates over environmental claims in advertising have been quietly raging for years but with the recent rise in attention to issues such as climate change, this debate has inflated dramatically. Many high-profile campaigns from leading car and oil manufacturers have already been banned for their misleading content, but there are still a lot of dubious adverts out there.
Green wash is a notoriously difficult subject to define since a lot of problems in environmental advertising are down to the sloppy use of stock phrases like ‘carbon neutral’, ‘100% recycled’ or ‘eco-friendly’. These slogans may sound nice and green, but they mean very little unless they are properly backed up with evidence.
Even so, there are some good guidelines available to help us distinguish between reliable information and green wash nonsense.
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Adverts which include loads of facts and figures may seek to ‘blind us with science’ whilst actually possessing very little substance or truth.
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Advertising is a very visual and provocative way to persuade us to buy things. A lovely picture doesn't prove an environmental claim one way or the other…
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Always take a critical perspective, e.g. can an oil company really claim to be environmentally friendly because it has paid for a wind farm?
If you keep these guidelines in mind when you next see an advert that makes claims about how a product "helps the environment”, you won't be taken in so easily by green wash.