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Saturday, November 29, 2008

Are You Being Greenwashed?

After researching about Greenwashing and finding out how naive I have been as a consumer; I thought that I need to become more aware and informed. After reasearching and educating myself I found a wonderful article from the Greenpeace website that discusses the 4 criteria for determing if something is greenwashing or not:

4 criterias:

Dirty Business - Touting an environmental program or product, while the corporation's product or core business is inherently polluting or unsustainable. For example, if a company brags about its boutique green R&D projects but the majority of spending and investment reinforces old, unsustainable, polluting practices.

Ad Bluster - Using targeted advertising and public relations campaigns to exaggerate an environmental achievement in order to divert attention away from environmental problems or if it spends more money advertising an environmental achievement than actually doing it. For example, if a company were to do a million dollar ad campaign about a clean up that cost less.
It's the Law, Stupid! - Advertising or branding a product with environmental achievements that are already required or mandated by existing laws. For example, if an industry or company has been forced to change a product, clean up its pollution or protect an endangered species, then uses PR campaigns to make such action look proactive or voluntary.


These 4 criterias can be viewed on http://stopgreenwash.org/


Hope they can help you become better informed as they have done for me!

Cynthia Pestner

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