Is Corporate Greenwashing Headed for a Fall?

Corporate Research E-Letter No. 69, January-February 2008


By Philip Mattera

Imagine you are a communication technician on a planet in another solar system that is facing an ecological disaster and is looking for new solutions. One day you suddenly pick up broadcast signals from Earth that happen to include a man talking to a group of children sitting beside a hulking vehicle he is describing as a “vegetarian” because it uses a fuel called ethanol. The segment ends with the statement: “Chevy: from gas-friendly to gas-free. That’s an American revolution.”

Then you get a transmission from something called BP that is talking about going beyond—beyond darkness, beyond fear, beyond petroleum. Another from Toyota shows a vehicle being put together like a grass hut and then disintegrating back into nature without a trace. The messages keep coming—from General Electric (“eco-imagination”), Chevron (celebrating the miraculous power of “human energy”) and so on.

As you receive more of these signals, you rush to your superiors and announce the good news: Planet Earth has wonderful entities called corporations that can solve all our environmental problems.





In 1990 the green business wave spread to the United States in time to coincide with the 20th annual Earth Day celebration. Large U.S. companies such as DuPont began touting their environmental initiatives and staged their own Earth Tech environmental technology fair on the National Mall. General Motors ran ads emphasizing its supposed concern about the environment, despite its continuing resistance to significant increases in fuel efficiency requirements.

Such exercises in corporate image-burnishing did not have a great deal of impact. For one thing, environmental groups wasted no time debunking the ads. In 1989 Friends of the Earth in Britain gave “Green Con” awards to those companies that made the most exaggerated and unsubstantiated environmental claims about their products. First prize went to British National Fuels for promoting nuclear power as friendly to the environment.

Greenpeace USA staged a protest at the 1990 corporate Earth Tech fair, denouncing companies such as DuPont for trying to whitewash their poor environmental record with green claims. Greenpeace’s invented term for this practice—greenwashing—immediately caught on, and to this day is a succinct way of undermining dubious corporate claims about the environment.

The general public was also not taken in by the corporate environmental push of 1989-1990. It was just a bit too obvious that these initiatives were meant to deflect attention away from recent environmental disasters such as the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and Union Carbide’s deadly Bhopal chemical leak. It also didn’t help that many of the claims about green products turned out to be misleading or meaningless.



On the other hand, the use of the term “greenwashing” is enjoying a resurgence and has entered the mainstream. A search of the Nexis news archive turns up more than 700 mentions of the term in the past six months alone. Even that bible of the marketing world—Advertising Age—recently published a list titled “The Green and the Greenwashed: Ten Who Get It and 10 Who Talk a Good Game.” Among the latter were General Motors, Toyota, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Wal-Mart, General Electric and Ikea, though Toyota, Wal-Mart and Ikea were also put on the green list for other reasons.

Other business publications have also been taking a more critical approach to green claims. Last September, the Wall Street Journal looked behind GE’s eco-imagination campaign and found all was not well.  For one thing, there was significant resistance even within GE’s managerial ranks and among many of the conglomerate’s major industrial customers. Then there was the fact that GE was still pushing big-ticket products such as coal-fired steam turbines that were significant contributors to global warming. Finally, the paper pointed out that the campaign was motivated in substantial part by a desire to increase sales of existing GE products such as wind turbines that could be promoted as eco-friendly.

In October, Business Week published a cover story titled “Little Green Lies.” It began with the declaration: “The sweet notion that making a company environmentally friendly can be not just cost-effective but profitable is going up in smoke.” The piece featured Auden Schendler of Aspen Skiing Company, a pioneer in adopting environmentally friendly practices. After showing off his company’s energy-efficient facilities, he turned to the Business Week reporter and said: “Who are we kidding?” He then acknowledged that the growth of the company necessarily means burning more power, including the ever-increasing energy needed to create artificial snow during warmer winters. “How do you really green your company? It’s almost f------ impossible.”



The most common shortcoming found by TerraChoice is the “sin of the hidden trade-off,” in which a single positive attribute of a product is promoted while ignoring the detrimental environmental impact of the whole manufacturing process. For example, paper that has some recycled content but is produced in a way that causes serious air and water pollution as well as entailing a large amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The other sins listed by TerraChoice are no proof, vagueness, irrelevance, lesser of two evils and fibbing.

Do-it-yourself greenwashing criticism is now possible through a website recently launched by EnviroMedia Social Marketing. Its Greenwashing Index site allows users to post ads—usually video footage taken from YouTube—and rate them on a scale of 1 (good ad) to 5 (total greenwashing).  






Then there’s the sin of size. A company as large as Wal-Mart will inevitably have a negative effect on the countries from which it obtains its goods, the agricultural areas from which it gets it food products, and the communities where it locates its big-box stores. There’s a growing sense that true sustainability entails a substantial degree of localism and moderate-size enterprise. That rules out Wal-Mart, no matter what its CEO professes.

Wal-Mart’s problem may be the problem of big business as a whole. As hard as they try to convince us, huge profit-maximizing transnational corporations may never be true friends of the environment. Let’s hope this message also gets through to those listening in distant worlds.

For more on greenwashing, see Sourcewatch.