Sustainability is hot. Correction: claiming to be sustainable is hot.
Nowadays, companies look for ways to market themselves as sustainable. They use recycled paper, only sell fish with an eco-label and drive plug-in hybrid vehicles. The reason for these measures is to create the opportunity to communicate externally about these sustainable actions and to create sustainable marketing campaign.
However, employees print far too many documents, consume an enormous amount of eco-fish and never load their plug-ins hybrid cars with electricity.
Even worse, their core business is the production of chemicals which pollute the soil and can never again be extracted. The production process in their factory uses tons of water and loads of energy. They purchase materials from China, where human rights are ignored in the mines and in South America forests are cut down for the rare materials they need. In the Netherlands, factory employees work with dangerous materials and gasses, without safety measures being strictly applied.
Clearly, no effort is put in becoming sustainable in the core business.
This is an example of greenwashing: making claims about being sustainable, which are untrue or only partly true. UL Environment defines the following seven sins of greenwashing:
1) Sin of the hidden trade-off
2) Sin of no proof
3) Sin of vagueness
4) Sin of worshipping false labels
5) Sin of irrelevance
6) Sin of lesser of two evils
7) Sin of fibbing
In the above example, the sin of irrelevance is exploited. The claims about recycled paper, eco-fish and plug-in hybrids are true, but they do not make the company sustainable on the whole.
As a consumer, please stay critical against messages conveyed by commercial companies. They might have made a complete switch towards a sustainable core business, but chances are small. Rather, they might be applying greenwashing. Before believing the green-ness of a product, make sure that none of the above sins is applied.
There is good news to end with. Among products claimed to be sustainable, the percentage of SIN-free products has increased, states UL Environment. It raised from 2.0% in 2009 to 4.5% in 2010. That’s a fantastic start (not!).