How Consumers Can Avoid Greenwashing
Since the launch of the Seven Sins of Greenwashing report, TerraChoice has received many questions about what consumers can do to avoid being greenwashed.
Even though governments in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia discourage greenwashing, these efforts are clearly not enough.
If the good intentions of consumers and the environmental benefits of their choices are to be leveraged, consumers themselves must play a role.
Here are four ways consumers can make a real impact on greenwashing:
1. Keep supporting greener products. As consumers, we have enormous power to shape the marketplace. The worst result of greenwashing would be to give up.
2. Look for, and choose, products with reliable eco-labels such as SFI, Green Seal and EcoLogo.
3. In the absence of a reliable eco-label, remember the Seven Sins of Greenwashing and choose the product that offers transparency, information and education.
4. For more information and green shopping tools, visit www.sinsofgreenwashing.org and www.ecologo.org.
Consumers who believe they have been greenwashed by a company engaging in misleading environmental marketing practices can also send a letter to a company to ask them to stop GREENWASHING. Use the draft letter under “Take Action” on the Sins website.
And if all of the above information isn’t enough, a list of organizations that are helping consumers to learn more about greenwashing and eco-labeling, as well as where they make truly greener purchases can all be found at www.sinsofgreenwashing.org.
2 Responses to “How Consumers Can Avoid Greenwashing”
Boy oh boy can I agree with this. The desperate need to make the public FOOL proof about green products is why we got started with our site The Greenformation Station. Yes a small plug but really I am placing this site on ours so others can see as well. Who knows ya might look at ours and link back who knows.
Question – What is your take on statements like:
“By using this recycle paper X number of trees were not cut down.”
“Save our forests – Recycle”
Research shows that in many cases paper fiber comes from the residuals of other industrial processes (sawmills). So the equations used to calculate the equivalent # of trees may be not be valid. Also, while tropical rainforests are disappearing, in many parts of the world, including North America, forest cover is stable or even increasing! … and these are areas where most of the world’s pulp and paper is produced. While recycling is indeed has sound environmental arguments – shouldn’t they be centered more on landfill issues? Isn’t it misleading to tie this back to trees – a renewable resource that is indeed being renewed in practice?
These statmenents appear to Sin in the areas of Vagueness and or Irrelavance (they infer cutting down trees equates with losing forests when this is not happening in areas where paper manufacture is well established and sustained).