It's my second favourite colour (after purple); it symbolises nature and the natural world. Green also represents tranquillity, good luck, health, and jealousy. It's an easy colour to live with.
Green is also a versatile adjective. Merriam-Webster provides ten different definitions just for the adjective form of green alone. It can mean the colour between yellow and blue on the light spectrum, covered in foliage, pleasant, youthful, unripe, envious, sickly, naive, unprocessed, and related to environmentalism.
I want to talk about that tenth definition of green:
| ♦️ often capitalized: relating to or being an environmentalist political movement ♦️ concerned with or supporting environmentalism ♦️ tending to preserve environmental quality (as by being recyclable, biodegradable, or non-polluting) |
Being green and supporting green ideas is becoming more mainstream. It used to be a fringe ideology, adopted by hippies and drop-outs.
As green ideas have entered the mainstream, a new phenomenon known as greenwash has emerged.
Greenwash involves pretending to be green in order to sell more.
But how can we detect this thin wash of 'green' over otherwise unchanged ideas and products?
First, some background. Many of us have started to question the decades-long practices of waste, overuse, pollution, and wanton destruction that characterises Western culture. We've re-discovered how humans belong within and impact on our life-sustaining ecology.
Not all people, by a long way. Some people maintain their belief in their right to dominate and use everything on the planet for their wants and whims; the old biblical 'dominion over the earth' idea.
But many people are concerned about the negative impacts of this world view. The exploding world population, Western countries' colossal over-consumption particularly of frivolous items (e.g. Fabergé eggs, plastic bottled water and Styrofoam take-away containers) and our prolific production of pollutants and poisons are all starting to show their effect. It's worrying.
As part of that concern, in Western societies (I can't talk about non-Western countries) people are more often looking more closely at what they buy: whether it's safe, healthy, recycled, natural, environmentally friendly, green. Since the 1980s (at least), we've seen the emergence of the 'green consumer' - people who factor the environmental impacts and their own longer-term health and well-being into their consumption choices.
A green consumer is:
♦️ a customer who wants to buy things that have been produced in a way that protects the natural environment.
It shouldn't be that hard, surely, for the green consumer?
A Venn diagram of what the green consumer considers when buying something.
What the green consumer wants is a green foundation: products and services that reflect green values and green processes. These are in the bottom two circles of the Venn diagram.
This evidence for the green foundation is provided through green marketing: green events, green words and labelling and green colour or images.
Supposedly, it's been getting easier to find green products.
In the past, green consumers had to go to small speciality stores. Not only was being a 'green consumer' more effort, it entailed higher costs. Thus, the 'green market' tended to be limited to more affluent people.
The mainstream retailers have taken notice of the affluent and growing green-consumer market, see this 2013 example:
| ♦️ The best 'green' customers are people with more money to spend. As a result, the most promising products for 'greening' tend to be at the higher end of the market. The most promising outlets for green products are retail stores frequented by better-off shoppers. |
Over the last decade, the large chains have begun to feature supposedly 'environmental' products, to create special 'green' shelf sections, and to source more supposedly 'green' products at the scale they need for supply. This seems like a positive step; with economies of scale, it will bring the cost down, so more can buy it.
It's a central plank of capitalism that consumers make informed choices and that consumer choice drives markets and pricing. Like all people, green consumers make their 'informed' choices based on the product labelling and information provided about ingredients, production, packaging, benefits, etc.
If we look at the details that green consumers are looking for, it looks like Venn diagram 2. The diagram is busy, but the details will be very familiar to most readers.
It's now almost ubiquitous for advertising to talk up the supposed 'green' credentials of products and services.
It would be great to think that the large producers and mainstream stores had reflected on their own values and concluded that products needed to change.
But, unsurprisingly, no. It's more that the growing interest in buying 'green' has been recognised as a great marketing angle to generate profit.
Advertising that uses events, colour and words without the foundation of green values or production process is how I spot greenwash.
The term greenwashing was coined by Jay Westervelt in 1986 in an article criticising hotel cards asking visitors to reuse towels on the pretext of 'saving the planet' as really only about profit. He highlighted other seemingly 'environmental' acts with no or minimal 'green' benefits.
It's a very handy word, which Merriam-Webster says is based on 'green' plus brainwashing, in its meaning of 'persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship'; but I think a second useful etymological alignment is with whitewashing, in its literal meaning of 'a liquid coating to whiten a surface', and its figurative meaning which is 'to gloss over or cover us, such as vices or crimes'.
Greenwashing sure looks like a crime to me
 |
| (Snip taken from this great poster.) |
Seeing through the deluge of greenwash is challenging. It's intended to be so.
At a fundamental level greenwash is simple to understand. It's a lie.
The difference between what green consumers want and what greenwash provides is shown in Venn 3: greenwash features only the three top circles: events, words and colour. But underneath the marketing through green events or activities, green colour and green words, many products have absolutely no foundation of green values or production processes. You see these dodgy words, vague claims, meaningless statements, and random images of trees on packaging everywhere on supermarket shelves, TV and social media, in the local community, and in many product disclosure statements.
Greenwashing is using green events, green words and green colour to imply green process and values that are not there.
Now, I don't have a green halo; I'm not about to judge your shopping trolley contents.
Each of us has to work this out, and there are multiple factors that influence an individual's purchases; the higher cost of genuinely green products being key.
But I resent being deliberately misled, so greenwashing makes me angry.
Lately I've been thinking, it's not enough to merely avoid faux-green products. It's against Australian law to mislead consumers. These false and misleading claims should be challenged.
But, did you know there is no legal definition of green meaning environmentally friendly? In fact, the words green and environmental are both pretty vague. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) 2011 publication Green marketing and the Australian Consumer Law says it best:
| ♦️ ‘Green’ This statement is very vague, and conveys little information to the consumer - other than the message that your product is in some way less damaging to the environment than others. This term invites consumers to give a wide range of meanings to the claim, which risks misleading them. ♦️ ‘Environmentally friendly’ or ‘environmentally safe’ These claims are also vague and could potentially mislead consumers into thinking that the product causes no harm to the environment in its production, usage and disposal. Few, if any, products could make this claim. Almost all products have some adverse impact on the environment in their manufacture, packaging, use or disposal. |
ACCC continues that producers, suppliers and advertisers need to explain how their products or services are green. Their 2011 publication is for producers and advertisers and is also a handy reference for consumers. It defines key words used in 'green claims' and it explains the various efficiency and other 'green' rating systems. It's worth a read.
The other role of the ACCC is to investigate green advertising claims that consumers report as false or misleading. I'm glad they have this role, but I think the flood of greenwash in advertising is beyond the scope of any agency to investigate and prosecute each individual instance. Interestingly, some industries have realised greenwash will eventually splash back all over the producers and have started voluntary oversight schemes (See Two Sides as an example.)
When despair overcomes my green resentment, I start to wonder if we are allowing ourselves to be misled to avoid the hard work of being a genuinely green consumer.
Are we too quick to swallow greenwash so we can feel better about environmental degradation? A sort of consumer mouthwash. But then, how hard should it be to be able to buy genuinely green products? Do I have the energy and resources to challenge advertisers 'green' claims through a legal process? Why the hell should I have to?
Making green consumer choices is almost impossible when we are drowning in greenwash.
Cynical manipulation of consumers' personal vulnerabilities and best intentions has long been a feature of marketing. Noam Chomsky points out this is to deliberately undermine markets working as they should, in order to make more profit. The least we can do is arm ourselves with a similar level of cynicism about the 'green' claims.
Greenwash represents a deliberate misleading of consumers, who don't get what they are paying for. Much worse, though, greenwashing props up the production and consumption practices that are decimating the ecology of our home planet. Faux green marketing is perpetuating the destruction that many of us want to see stop.
At heart, green consuming involves buying less. At its heart, greenwash is about increasing consumption and profit.
Fundamentally, it remains up to each of us to ensure we are buying only what we need and products that are genuinely what they claim to be.
Otherwise, don't buy it. If you can, set up coordinated boycotts, complain to the large mainstream chains, threaten to report to ACCC if items continue to be stocked, and follow through with these reports.
Be motivated by your green anger at being deliberately misled.
- Green nine colours image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=935753
- Green tick: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Green_check.svg
- Green plants: https://www.dailyclipart.net/clipart/green-plants-clip-art/
- Green ribbon: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green_ribbon.svg
- Venn diagrams and quote by Chomsky artwork by author.
- Green marketing guide by Choice, Australia https://www.choice.com.au/shopping/packaging-labelling-and-advertising/labelling/articles/green-claims-on-supermarket-labels
- Greenwash poster by US Contract Services Group, Inc. at https://283knn17wrdq3dg7tp1b92iy-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/greenwash-large.jpg
- Green marketing and the Australian Consumer Law by the ACCC https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Green%20marketing%20and%20the%20ACL.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are moderated. After you click Publish (bottom left), you will get a pop up for approval. You may also get a Blogger request to confirm your name to be displayed with your comment. I aim to reply within two days.