Beware of Greenwashing

If you’ve been paying attention to a lot of social justice-related topics in the past ten years, you’ve probably heard of Whitewashing and Pinkwashing. Whitewashing is deliberately attempting to conceal potentially incriminating and unsavory information about someone or something. In North America, this is used in the context of discussions about race relations. Then there’s pinkwashing. Pinkwashing is a term used by the LGBT community to describe a person, organization, or government showing surface-level support for the queer and trans community in an attempt to cover up their other misdeeds (whether related to LGBT issues or not). Think of all the multinational, multibillion-dollar corporations doing Pride Month promotions. But, have you heard of greenwashing? 

Greenwashing is when a person, group of people, organization, or government disseminates misinformation that portrays themselves as environmentally conscious to the general public. This is done for one or both two purposes. One of which is to cover up any of their practices that are the opposite of environmentally friendly. The other is to cover up any other sort of abusive practice not related to the environment. The biggest examples of this are usually found among multinational corporations abusing their power. 

There are several well-known examples of greenwashing by corporations in recent years. One is Innocent Drinks’ recent ad campaign. They are a beverage company from the UK that is owned by Coca-Cola. They ran a series of ads with a bunch of animated animals singing about how sustainable they are and they use sustainable packaging etc. etc. However, the ads were lying. They use tons of single-use plastics in their beverages which as we know, is one of the biggest causes of pollution in the oceans. They were thankfully called out by an environmental rights group and the ads were banned from the airwaves by the UK’s ad regulatory body. 

So, what can we take away from this? We can look at this example and learn that whenever a company is claiming to be super sustainable and environmentally friendly, we need to do more research. We need to find out everything we would need to know about that company to see whether they are trying to greenwash their exploitative practices away. And we need to find companies that don’t greenwash to have available alternatives to use (Milk and Rose for one ;)) 

This will help us as consumers to make ethical, sustainable choices and do our part to protect our planet. Like the title says, BEWARE OF GREENWASHING!