Greenwashing: What is it, how it works and examples

The word “Greenwashing” It is composed of two English roots, “Green-“, which is green, and “-washing”, which means washing. Could therefore be translated as a “Green Washing”a marketing form that certain companies adopt in which they claim to have acquired an environmental commitment, either in the company’s own operation, in the relationships that it establishes with third parties or in the products or services it provides, without having introduced significant changes in its environmental policies.

Thus, the company benefits from the good intentions of its customers, who will prefer these companies to others less “green”, even accepting cost overruns, without carrying out an activity that they promote.

This has several serious consequences:

• Environmental problems: No improvement is introduced regarding these issues, or if done, it is so small the proportion that becomes practically imperceptible in the results.
• Consumer deception: Consumer organizations usually have an eye on Greenwashing’s phenomena, since being selling properties that really do not have a counterpart in reality, they form as a real deception to the consumer.
• Public disaffection: It has been proven that customers of a certain sector lose confidence in “green” products when cases of Greenwashing come to light. Then the concrete company that Greenwashing has perpetrated is not only penalized, but it is also harmful to the rest of the companies in that sector, since confidence in general by this type of entities, products or services is lost. Thus, those organizations that really exercise an effort to reduce their ecological footprint are questioned by their clients.

He Greenwashing phenomenon It has been taking place since the 1980s, and is part of a general tendency to “disguise” good intentions to organizations that definitely do not take into account the Corporate Social Responsibility (or CSR). These phenomena receive the general name of “Whitewashing”and is subdivided into “Greenwashing”, “Pinkwashing”, “Bluewashing”, etc.

Greenwashing includes different strategies for deceive the consumer Or, to put it in another way, not to tell the whole truth or count a lies halfway. In this section we will state some of the most common, which will be illustrated with examples in the following section.

• “Green” marketing: Companies and organizations use green colors and images of environments or natural elements to imply the consumer who are respectful of the environment, although they have not introduced any change in their policies. This is the most common strategy, and if you look around you will surely find several products that follow this pattern.
• Compliance with legal requirements: There are some brands that announce as “green” a product, when all it does is comply with current environmental legislation.
• Partially green: There are companies that introduce small little significant improvements and sell them as a titanic effort for the environment, although the rest of their activities (usually the main ones) continue to cause a very high negative environmental impact. Here we include products that are harmful per sewhich sell as “healthy” when introducing a very slight improvement.
• The vagueness: There are companies that give clues like “We work to reduce our carbon footprint”, or “We want our planet.” This would be examples of vague slogans, which do not inform the client of the real commitment.
• Non-Prueba: In this case, there is talk of concrete results, but not reliable evidence is offered that the company is really carrying it out. Environmental improvements should always be accompanied by transparency.
• Distort results and lie: There are some companies that lie or misrepresent their results in terms of environmental policy, even using stamps for which they are not really certified.

Let’s look at some Greenwashing examples which are significant:

• Companies of Fast food o Fast food: Some fast food companies use “green” marketing strategies by changing the original color of their brand for a green color that indicates relationship with the natural. In many cases it has been seen how they make this change in the brand but then very partial improvements are made in terms of separation in the origin of the waste they generate. However, livestock and intensive agriculture, the use of chemicals in their products and the very long transport chains that these companies use make them little green or nothing green.
• Energy companies: In some cases of this type of companies, Greenwashing extends to the name of the companies. Normally, words related to nature and ecology to words such as “energy”, clearly encouraging to think of the generation of green energy. However, there are companies of this type that are not dedicated to clean or green energies or do not do it completely and continue working with dirty or very polluting energies.

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