How to spot and avoid greenwashing (Patreon)

[This is a transcript with links to references.]

Does this sound familiar? You go to a supermarket to get a new bathroom cleaner. One of them promises to be more sustainable and eco-friendlier, but the other one is cheaper. Which do you buy?

Many companies try to appear environmentally friendly without making a real difference, a strategy that’s been dubbed “greenwashing”. So, is calling a product or service “eco-friendly” just a ploy of companies to get more money out of us? What are the consequences for climate change? And how can we spot those fake claims? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

We all like to think of ourselves as good people, so we do our part for the environment. Or at least we pretend we do. Companies have noticed that too, so they’ll mark products as eco-friendly or earth-friendly or climate neutral or all natural, or in any case at least put some green icon on it. You can download a pack of those for free online and as you can see it makes you instantly look very green. I swear I’m also 100 percent organic.

Greenwashing is widespread. A 2020 study by the European Council found that more than half of the environmental claims that companies in the EU made were vague, misleading or unfounded. And it’s not just labels. The environmental marketing firm TerraChoice has classified the claims that companies made about their products into what they call the seven sins of greenwashing.

First, there’s the Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off. That’s when a product is marketed as green based on some environmental benefit, but other, often bigger issues, go unmentioned. A typical example is batteries for electric cars. They don’t release carbon dioxide emissions when in use. But their production has a carbon footprint and often also causes air and water pollution. Calling them “zero emissions” is fine. Calling them “zero pollution” is greenwashing.

Next is the Sin of No Proof. This happens when a product's environmental claim is just words, and not supported by publicly available information or a third-party test. A typical example is the claim that a product is 100 percent biodegradable, but that number is just guesswork rather than an actual test result.

The third is the Sin of Vagueness, claims which sound good but mean nothing, like the phrase “all natural”. Arsenic, for example, is natural, but it’s neither good for the environment, nor for you. Or the “climate positive” label that you can find on some products. It’s supposed to mean a product is taking more carbon dioxide out of the air than it produces, which can be said about any plant, so long as it grows. And if it’s not a plant, who checked if it’s true?

Then we have the Sin of Irrelevance, claims that are correct but don’t matter. A typical example is labelling a product as free of CFCs which destroy the ozone layer. That’s nice and the label surely looks good, but these chemicals are banned by law anyway.

Sin number five is the Lesser of Two Evils. This is when a claim may be true within a product category, but that category itself is not environmentally friendly.

For example, a fuel-efficient SUV may well be more environmentally friendly than that of another company, but that doesn’t mean either of them is particularly good.

Sixth is the Sin of Fibbing. Since I had to look up this word in the dictionary, let me add that “fib” seems to be a somewhat dated British expression for a small lie. A typical example is the claim that paper or plastic is made from 100 percent recycled material. In many, if not most, cases, substantial parts of these supposedly recycled materials come from industrial waste, not from consumer waste. That is, a 100 percent recycled bottle might largely be made of plastic that was discarded at some factory. Now that’s still an improvement over burning the stuff, but the label doesn’t mean what you think it means, does it. So, fibbing.

Finally, we have the Sin of False Labels. Just download a few green badges, tack them on your product, done. If consumers don’t know exactly what to watch out for, these labels can look very similar to reliable certification labels. And if that wasn’t enough you could also just make the whole thing green!

As you see there are many ways to greenwash and it’s particularly widespread when it comes to pledges about reducing carbon dioxide emissions. A recent study by the German non-profit organization New Climate Institute looked at the climate pledges of 24 large, multinational companies, such as Samsung, Walmart, Google, and Apple. They all claim to do much more than their plans can achieve.

Even if they pulled through with their schedule, this’d only slice fifteen percent off their collective emissions by 2030. And rather than reaching net zero by 2050, it’d reduce their current emissions by just about a third. According to the conclusions of the report: “Overall, we find the climate strategies of fifteen of the 24 companies to be of low or very low integrity”. Lots of fibbing. I kind of like that word, maybe I’ll buy a set of ten next time they’re on sale.

Okay, we’ve seen there’s a lot of greenwashing, but what’s the role of the consumer in all that?

Surveys consistently find that a substantial fraction of consumers says they are more likely to buy products that are environmentally friendly. For example, this survey from the environmental organization changing markets found that about a third of people both in the UK and in Germany say they are slightly more likely or much more likely to buy products labelled as “carbon neutral” or “climate positive”. This gives producers an incentive to tack green claims on their products.

But most consumers don’t believe half of what producers say. A recent market analysis found that only 25 percent of them trust environmental claims on fast moving consumer goods. And just so we’re on the same page, that a good is fast moving doesn’t mean it’s doing gymnastics, it means it doesn’t sit on the shelves for long.

When consumers find out they’ve been duped, the integrity of the brand suffers and that creates a financial risk for investors. It’s not just the loss of integrity perceived by the consumer. You could say, well, they’ll forget about it. But empty environmental claims also reveal there is something fishy about the business strategy of the company, and that can spook investors. And increasingly, greenwashing doesn’t just risk a loss of integrity and financial trouble, but especially in the EU it’s also become a legal risk.

So why are companies still doing it? Partly it’s just because it’s difficult to get these things right. We like to think of big companies as condensates of evil, but in the end, they’re run by normal people and they’re as confused about how to be environmentally friendly as you and I.

The other issue is that while it’s easy to blame companies for greenwashing, we play a role in it too. Companies lie to us in part because we want them to lie to us. That doesn’t excuse the lies, but it explains why they persist. It’s because our own environmental consciousness is often more talk than walk. A 2019 study by the Harvard Business Review found for example that while 65 percent of consumers *say they want green products, only 26 percent actually *buy them.

And companies know this, not because someone did a study on it, but because they see it in their revenue. So they do exactly what the consumer seems to ask for: Provide an appearance of greenness,  like this guy spray painting his grass, instant result guaranteed.

Greenwashing doesn't just trick consumers into buying something that doesn’t align with their values, it also creates a false sense of progress. Greenwashing makes it look like companies are making an effort while they’re really just distracting us from what’s happening. Worse still, greenwashing contributes to the damage. Because investments that go into *pretending to be green don’t go into efforts to *actually protect the environment.

It’s tempting to think that all companies lie anyway, so why make an effort? But it isn’t quite as bad.

The global market for green and sustainable technologies and products is increasing and is projected to see a further steep increase by the end of the decade. And many companies are sincere about being environmentally friendly.

For example, IKEA has invested billions of dollars into outfitting their stores with solar panels. It’s not a plan--they’ve already done it. The American chocolate company Hershey’s has reduced their carbon footprint by 41 percent since 2018 by improving energy efficiency and switching to renewables, and they go to great pains to have their progress validated by third parties. The British company CorrBoard has built its entire business around sustainable cardboard production by recycling and using renewables. And while Apple isn’t as far along in 2023 as they said they’d be, they have in fact built wind farms and solar arrays and are making a serious effort to get to net zero.

This was a somewhat arbitrary selection, I admit, but I didn’t want you to go away with the impression that everyone is just lying about what they do. Good stuff is happening, it’s just difficult to find. So what to do?

I do these videos to inform you, not to preach to you, so I’ve been somewhat uncomfortable with this part of the video. I therefore put it out there before I start that I am saying the following under the assumption that you came here looking for concrete advice. I understand that being environmentally friendly sometimes just isn’t an option, and I swear I won’t look over your shoulder and wag a finger at what you buy.

That said, I hereby present you the seven virtues of green shopping.

First, tracking down environmental information can be cumbersome and time-consuming. So focus on stuff you regularly buy that you can check at home, and on large investments, such as maybe new appliances for which it’s worth the effort.

Second, check if someone’s done the work for you. There are a couple of online retailers that collect eco-friendly products, such as the biggreensmile, ecohoy, sustainkart, and several others. If I can find them, so can you.

Third, if those online retailers don’t suit your needs and you’d rather stick with your favorite supermarket, check if there’s an app for it. There are a lot of apps that let you scan barcodes and that’ll give you product information based on this. These barcodes are country-dependent, so you’ll have to look for one yourself. I have tried several of those in Germany and I found them to be good in terms of health and nutrition information. But they weren’t particularly helpful for environmental advice. Still, it might be worth checking if you can find a useful one where you live.

Fourth, if you can’t get an app to do the job, look for third-party labels that confirm the product has undergone independent tests. Unfortunately, there’s a bewildering variety of those labels, more than 450 to date. You can look them up on a website called ecolabelindex dot com. But if you go through a list that long in the snacks aisle, someone’s going to roll you over with their shopping cart before you’re even half through, so what to do?

Again, check if there’s an app for this. In Germany there’s one from NABU that lets you scan a label and tells you what that means. Here’s me scanning a label on an egg box. The European Union is in the process of passing a bunch of laws that are supposed to make the whole environmental labeling business easier to comprehend, but it’ll take some time for that to come into effect, and then another one hundred years or so until anyone uses it.

It's also good to make yourself familiar with some of the most common green labels that you can trust. For example the Green Seal for sustainability, the Energy Starfor energy efficiency,the Green-e label in the US, and the EU Ecolabel in the EU.

Fifth, be wary of vagueness. Watch out for words that sound good but have no clear meaning. Words like “Green” “eco-friendly” “climate positive” or “natural” without proof of any certification standard aren’t green flags, they’re red flags. They’re meant to distract you from the absence of a label.

Sixth, look for information about the producer from independent organizations because this can quickly give you an overall impression. For example, while the greenwashing report from the NewClimate Institute that I mentioned previously basically says megacompanies all suck, some suck more than others. Google and Microsoft are both equally mediocre in terms of climate friendliness, but Apple got a considerably better rating than Samsung. I switched from an iPhone to Samsung a few years ago and now feel bad about it. Though it was driving me nuts that the iPhone couldn’t cope with the tiniest bit of rain.

My seventh and final piece of advice is: don’t sweat the small stuff. While we’re debating whether it’s okay to coat paper straws with plastic, someone’s opening new coal mines. I don’t mean to say forget about the paper straws, but if you have time to spare, better think about whom to vote for in the next election.

In summary, greenwashing is extremely common, but some companies are genuinely trying to do the right thing. It does take a little extra effort to sort the wheat from the chaff, but when I was working on this video, I noticed it’s much easier than I thought it’d be. It’s because companies who are serious about environmental protection like to show off their achievements with detailed reports and third-party certifications.

Honestly, when I started doing this video, I was really cynical about corporations pretending to be green, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how much has changed in the past 10 years. How do you deal with the problem of deciding what to buy? Let me know in the comments.