Greenwashing is another word for lying. By Bev Tucker, South Africa. Co-Sponsored by CommunityAlchemy.com & openmythsource.com

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Greenwashing is another word for lying. By Bev Tucker, South Africa. Co-Sponsored by CommunityAlchemy.com & openmythsource.com

Green is not a colour. It’s a movement. Business knows that like war, famine and disease, movements are brilliant money-spinners. Just look around. There’s the multi-billion dollar spirituality industry, the pop-psychology industry and the health food industry to name but a few. Enter the greenwashing industry, which is all about lying first, lying best and getting consumers to love you for it.

The suits latched on fast to the green Rand. The availability of goods across the spectrum of all consumable and non-consumable items claiming to be somehow eco-friendly, from bath salts to camping equipment, has risen to a ridiculous 176%. This figure is taken from a 2009 study by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing, which also found that 98% of allegedly eco-friendly products are greenwashed (did I mention that greenwashing is another word for lying?). Let’s be perfectly clear: a maximum of 2% of all products claiming any degree of green ’n clean-ness are portraying the truth. 98% are lying either completely or somewhat. They do this by abusing the words ‘recyclable’ and ‘organic’, mixed randomly with emotive language like ‘mother earth’, ‘fresh’, ‘pure’ and ‘all-natural’. Arsenic and mercury are all-natural. Preservatives will make the most raddled tomato appear plump and fresh picked that very morning in a dewy garden.

It’s lies, people! All lies.

Yet what magnificent lies they are. Elaborate, celeb-retard rock concert-sized lying campaigns that represent millions upon millions in ad spend. The advertising industry just loves and adores a nice, big, fat, juicy, greenwashing campaign (I did explain that greenwashing is exactly the same as lying, right?) in which the cleverest of clever creatives in the smarmiest of arty advertising agencies pop on their thinking caps to greenwash products (lie) and pickpocket consumers at the very same time. Oh such a jape! My stomach hurts from chuckling.

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Samsung South Africa’s greenwashing shame. In case you’ve forgotten, in March 2010 Samsung was caught blatantly lying in printed advertising material that declared multiple eco-awards supposedly attributed to many of their household appliances. The awards were non-existent. Who’da thunk a big company like Samsung would just lie outright like that? That’s the sort of thing you’d expect from a Chinese baby formula factory, not Samsung, manufacturers of appliances that turn the cogs of home and hearth. As it happens, March also marked the anniversary of the 2008 death of Isabel Jones, the well-known consumer journalist with a voice as insistent as a rusty nail in the foot, best known for her consumer rights show Fair Deal. She would have loved the Samsung debacle.

As Isabel discovered, South African consumers are a trusting bunch on the whole. We also have far more pressing demands on our time than conducting background checks on soap powder and refrigerators. The fact that Samsung’s arch rival LG was the hand behind the pointing finger made the story so much more delicious, LG themselves being a far from innocent bystander in the ecological crime stakes. Few people took notice of the minor flurry in the media. The next time the iron died they dashed off to Game and tucked a new Samsung under their arm. The secret of greenwashing is that consumers can usually be relied on to be apathetic and, more importantly, uninformed.

Ultimately, consumerism is not ecologically sound, no matter which way we slice it. Buying stuff we don't need, regardless of how ethically it’s made, is environmentally unsound. Klaar. In the ideal world we’d buy next to nothing. Fact is, we won’t stop spending the lucre we sell our souls to get (advertising at play again) so the next best bet is for us to become highly discerning shoppers. Just because that dinky hessian bag packaging looks as wholesome as granny’s apple pie and the label uses the phrase ‘from nature’ doesn’t mean the contents have a green stamp of approval.

Greenwashing was a term coined by Greenpeace in the early ‘90’s at a Washington trade fair at which some of the world’s biggest polluters tried repositioning their bad ol’ selves as earth lovin’ corporates. Companies pretending to act in the best interests of the environment while doing the precise opposite are nothing new. Some of our most trusted brands are among the guiltiest offenders. The question is, who can we trust and where does one find a comprehensive public list naming and shaming the liars and the thieves and their slimy agents?

To my knowledge, no such list yet exists in South Africa. We are in dire need of a Greenwashing Index, an Isabel Jones of the environment, to out greenwashing manufacturers, businesses, government departments and consumer products as well as the advertising agencies that lie for money. It is not unreasonable to ask that if a product or business claims environmental brownie points, they should have, at minimum, a few contactable references.

The Greenwashing Index will come as the environmental movement grows in numbers, power and sophistication. Mr and Mrs Average need to become more informed and angrier about the greenwashing that makes a cynical mockery of their sincere efforts to help save the planet for future generations. It may take something as terrible as baby deaths like the ones in China before SA consumers get riled up. But once the tide turns our goodwill and innocence, so easily milked at present, could turn rather nastily on the brands and producers found to lie or even to merely blur the truth. As the man in the street savvies up and as his hard-earned Rand power diminishes, ad execs and product developers may have more sleepless nights about being associated with any brand spotted lurking around the greenwashing aisle.

Source | Author: Bev Tucker, Bush Babe

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