The Greenwash

We are currently victims of a greenwash. What is a greenwash? It's when we are constantly bombarded by products and brands that claim to be "green" and "eco-friendly." I'm not about to say that companies trying to be more sustainable is a bad thing, it's not. What I will say is that we don't know what "green" and "eco-friendly" actually mean. There's no standard, there's no real definition. Is a company allowed to brand themselves as "green" because they recycle all their used paper? Can a bottled water company be called green because they use 30% less plastic in their bottles, despite the other 70%?

The problem is there's no way to set a standard anymore. We could have at the beginning, but now "green" is almost a brand unto itself. It's too large, too amorphous, for any single entity to get a grasp of and bring under control. As consumers, the responsibility falls on us to be skeptical of companies throwing around those terms with wreckless abandon. We have to remember that, in the end, a company actively branding itself as "green" is doing so to get a leg up on the competition because it's what consumers want to hear right now. We need to look into the practices of those companies before we decide they can ethically label themselves as "eco-friendly."

Maybe it's also important to remember that no kind of consumption and purchasing is eco-friendly. It can only be less harmful.

So what does this mean for your company? Well, if you want to have a green policy make sure it's one that actually helps. Something that goes above and beyond recycling your office paper. Encourage (even require?) your employees to take public transportation. Use only enough electricity to power what you need, leave lights off and use natural lighting. Make sure your products don't have a lasting impact on the environment (stainless-steel is a good example of this. It lasts forever in the home, but bio-degrades in a reasonable amount of time in nature). Three times a year, have your office go plant trees to make up for the ones that were cut down for your paper. Three times a year, clean up the trash from your company's city.

If you're going to slap the green title onto your brand, make sure you deserve it. Otherwise you're just manipulating people.