Greenwashing: When Pretending Being Green Can Backfire

If we look around, there is nothing to worry about climate change: from oil producers (remember the Shell ad?) to car manufacturers, everyone is green.

This colour appears to be the most fashionable over the last three years because it has been the topic of discussion of all the PR services at multinationals. However, no one can make a business evolve to sustainable development in such a short time, but everybody can pretend to do so and then greenwash its consumers.

The term “greenwashing” was coined by Jay Westerveld in 1986 to describe the false claims of the hotel industry. Greenwashing applies when a company falsely claims that its products or practices are 100% environmentally friendly and use this assertion as a means of differentiation to win the trust of consumers.

TerraPass, a US based environmental marketing agency, published a report last year titled “The Six Sins of Greenwashing”. According to this report, “all but one of the 1,018 products reviewed committed at least one of the Six Sins of Greenwashing”. The website Good Guide goes even further by providing “information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of products and companies”. These two examples symbolize the rise of well informed and empowered groups of interest that can destroy the credibility of a company.

In this background, the media industry has to go green, but can do it progressively by avoiding the trap of greenwashing. The Zero Emissions/Zero Waste target is the ultimate goal, but before reaching this ideal you can take several measures, the most original one being -greening your website-.

Has it ever crossed your mind your own website is a source of Co2 emissions?

Carbon-Neutral-Website and Terrapass offer you the possibility to offset the emissions of CO2 of your website based on the consumption and the location of your servers. CO2stats goes one step further in the calculations by  taking into account “the greenhouse gas footprint of visits to your site, based on locations of your visitors and servers, computer types, window and monitor sizes, local fuel mixes, download sizes and times”.

The use of carbon offset is only a part of the solution that does not prevent you from taking more crucial measures. Be oblivious to it… and you become a greenwasher.

I like it!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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