What is greenwashing?

What is greenwashing?

Greenwashing is where a company uses advertising and public messaging to try to appear to be environmentally sustainable and green when in reality, that isn't accurate. 

It’s also a technique used by certain companies to distract consumers from the fact that their business model and activities actually do a lot of environmental harm and damage.

Why is greenwashing a problem?

Greenwashing is a problem for a number of reasons. 

Primarily, it means that consumers are not being given accurate information with which to make purchasing decisions about anything from bottled water to air travel.

But the bigger-picture damage done by greenwashing is the delaying and dsitracting from real solutions we need to implement to tackle the climate and nature crises, like phasing out fossil fuels and stopping production of unnecessary plastic. 

Why do companies spend so much money on ‘greenwash’ advertising? What benefits are they seeing?

Companies spend millions on reputational advertising to protect their social license to operate, that is, the ongoing public acceptance of their business practices. They do it to attract customers, and they do it to win over supporters – often in governments – so that they can continue to operate as they wish.

While greenwashing isn’t new, there’s been a huge uptick in interest among consumers recently around environmentally and socially conscious products, and consumers are much more concerned about making environmentally friendly purchasing decisions. So, companies have a real financial incentive to appear sustainable and socially conscious.

There’s also increasing pressure from governments, financial regulators, investors and the public for companies to make environmental commitments around sustainability, climate change and biodiversity. Greenwashing is a way for a company to convince people that it is part of the solution to climate or biodiversity crises. This, in turn, allows it to gain customers, protect its financial interests and, in some cases, actively distract attention away from the negative environmental impacts that its actions are having.

Is greenwashing more commonplace in certain industries?

In the past few years, there has been a huge amount of greenwashing in the oil and gas sector, particularly from gas companies. The fossil fuel industry has been running a sophisticated and well-documented campaign to slow down climate action for the past 30 years, and this is the latest iteration of it.

The other big area is plastics and packaging. This is because there has recently been a huge amount of consumer concern around the impact of plastic packaging on our planet, and as a result, supermarkets and other fast-goods companies are trying to make their products appear as green as possible. 

Many different brands, for all sorts of products, are really latching onto consumer concern about the environment now, and are using more ‘green’ advertising to sell products. That’s not to say that every green claim made by a company is inaccurate or misleading, but there are certainly a lot of claims made that don’t match up with reality.

How can we spot when a brand is greenwashing?

There are a lot of surprisingly simple ways in which brands engage in greenwashing – the way that they design their packaging for example. Something as simple as using green imagery and typeface, or more ‘natural looking’ packaging, a certain kind of consumer is more likely to buy it, and you can even charge more for it. Things are often labelled as ‘eco’ or ‘sustainable’ without those terms actually having any real meaning. Although there are guidelines around doing this, they often aren’t adhered to. If you visit any shop, or look at any billboard, there will always be products trying to cash-in on the green market like this.

What has ClientEarth done about greenwashing?

In 2019 we brought a complaint against BP for its ‘Possibilities Everywhere: Keep Advancing’ advertising campaign. The campaign used some advertising techniques that we often see in the fossil fuels sector. BP emphasised its very small and insignificant renewable energy investments as if they were a far bigger part of its business model than in reality. It also talked about gas as a transition fuel, when in reality it is a fossil fuel that is contributing to climate change, and needs to be phased out of our energy systems in order to meet the 1.5 degrees goal of the Paris Agreement.

We put together a complaint to the UK National Contact Point for the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises against BP, claiming that its ads were misleading. The campaign emphasised the company’s low carbon energy products, when in fact 96% of its annual spend is on oil and gas.

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What do we want to see in the future to help tackle the issue of greenwashing?

We believe that all advertising must be properly regulated with strong enforcement of existing laws. We also think that fossil fuel advertising, in particular, must come with a tobacco-style health warning about the dangers of fossil fuels, given that they cause dangerous climate change and global heating.

Such a warning label would help educate the public about climate change generally, and would also shine a spotlight on the particularly egregious behaviour of a sector that has, over the years, slowed down climate action and contributed more than any other industry to the climate crisis that we now face.