Greenwashing
Spending more on presenting an organization as environmentally responsible than on being so, so that the audience's approval of the image substitutes for scrutiny of the record.
Approval is cheaper to buy than to earn. Greenwashing buys it: a leaf on the logo, a "commitment" announced with a distant deadline, a small genuine program advertised at a scale that implies a large one, a vague word, "natural," "eco," "sustainable," attached to an unchanged product. The audience wants to believe, and the device supplies the belief while the practice continues.
The word was coined by Jay Westerveld in 1986 for hotels that asked guests to reuse towels "for the environment" while doing nothing else. Its relatives, pinkwashing for gay rights or breast cancer, bluewashing for the United Nations, purpose-washing for any cause, work the same way: association with a value in place of action on it. The device is the organizational form of glittering generalities and transfer. Exploits Halo Effect and Affect Heuristic.
In advertising and commerce
Chevron's "People Do" campaign, launched in 1985, showed the company protecting butterflies and bears in advertisements that won an Effie award, while the programs shown were in several cases legally required and cost a fraction of the campaign. Critics documented the gap, and the campaign became the standard classroom case.
Beder, Sharon. Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism. Rev. ed. White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2002.
BP rebranded as "Beyond Petroleum" in 2000, with a green-and-yellow sunflower logo and a reported $200 million campaign, while its investment in renewables remained a small fraction of its capital spending on oil and gas. The slogan was retired after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, by which point it had become the shorthand for the device.
Beder, Sharon. "bp: Beyond Petroleum?" In Battling Big Business: Countering Greenwash, Infiltration and Other Forms of Corporate Bullying, edited by Eveline Lubbers. Devon: Green Books, 2002.
Volkswagen marketed "clean diesel" in the United States for years while its vehicles ran software that detected emissions tests and reduced emissions only during them. The Environmental Protection Agency's 2015 notice of violation exposed the scheme; the marketing had been the environmental program.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Notice of Violation to Volkswagen AG, 18 September 2015; Ewing, Jack. Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017.
Find an advertisement that describes a company or product as green, natural, or sustainable. What specifically has the company done? Can you find a number for it?
In the wild
Short examples of the technique at work, each with what to notice. The same examples are questions in the quiz, where the answer is not given away.
A bottled-water brand adds a leaf to its label and the words "made with care for the planet." The bottle, the water, and the plant are unchanged.
What to notice. Green imagery and a value word attached to an unchanged product; the organization buys approval it has not earned.
An airline's homepage leads with its tree-planting program; the program's budget is a thousandth of its fuel bill.
What to notice. A small genuine program advertised at a scale that implies a large one, in place of the core record.
"Our commitment: net zero by 2060." No interim target, no baseline, and no report.
What to notice. A distant, unmeasured commitment offered as present virtue.
Sources
- Beder, Sharon. Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism. Rev. ed. White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2002. ISBN 978-1931498456
- TerraChoice. The Sins of Greenwashing: Home and Family Edition. Ottawa: TerraChoice/UL, 2010.
- Ewing, Jack. Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal. New York: W. W. Norton, 2017. ISBN 978-0393254501
- Lyon, Thomas P., and A. Wren Montgomery. "The Means and End of Greenwash." Organization & Environment 28, no. 2 (2015): 223–249. doi:10.1177/1086026615575332