Just in time for Earth Day, GreenYour Media LLC has announced the beta launch of its new GreenYour.com site. Better than Googling, GreenYour.com lets consumers search for green product and lifestyle alternatives by category or keyword. Type in Green Your “Hair”, for example, and up pops facts on shampoo and hair dye as well as tips and product recommendations.

The new green search site is noteworthy for its comprehensive criteria in determining whether or not a product is eco-friendly. Green attributes are considered as well as green yield, which is defined as the ability of a product to help consumers reduce waste and environmental impact. Products are also considered green when they have been certified and labeled by a credible environmental organization. In other words, the folks behind GreenYour.com are looking to help clear up consumer confusion around ecolabeling and combat greenwashing by clearly identifying products that meet reliable environmental standards. In its list of credible standards, GreenYour.com includes EcoLogo, Green Seal, the EPA’s Energy Star program, USDA Organic, Greenguard and the Forest Stewardship Council.

GreenYour.com apparently has great plans for the future. Since it is built on an open-source content development platform, the creators of the site are clearly intending to make it accessible to outside sources for content contribution. According to the press release, “Next, we will introduce a range of interactive tools and partnerships.”

Oh, and GreenYour.com has a blog too. Welcome to the blogosphere.

First there was green marketing, and then there was greenwashing. Now the pendulum is swinging back again. According to a new study by Burst Media (via Green Daily), consumers are growing wise to green advertising claims. More than 20% of survey respondents said they seldom or never believe environmental claims in product ads, and two-thirds said they only “sometimes” believe.

So is consumer skepticism good or bad? Probably both.

Given the level of greenwashing in the market, it’s a good thing that consumers aren’t falling for every green marketing trick. However, the entire purpose of environmental labeling is to make environmentally-friendly choices available and apparent to the public. If consumers disregard all green advertising, it means many of them are foregoing potentially eco-friendly product alternatives. It’s important to bring clarity and transparency to ecolabelling… before consumers turn away altogether.

Fortunately, there are resources for consumers seeking a little truth in marketing. In addition to looking for accredited environmental labels like EcoLogo, consumers can visit (and contribute to) sites like the new Greenwashing Index. The Greenwashing Index aims to collect and publish examples of greenwashing in product ads. The site’s criteria for greenwashing covers a lot of the same ground as the TerraChoice “Six Sins of Greenwashing” report. For example, the site talks about ads that make green claims that are “vague or seemingly unprovable.” This matches up well with the Sin of Vagueness and the Sin of No Proof.

The more it’s possible to separate the green from the greenwash, the more consumers will buy green products when they hit the stores. Healthy skepticism is good. Giving up on green is not.

More and more companies are coming out with their own green product lines: JCPenny’s Simply Green products, Home Depot’s Eco Options category and Clorox’s Green Works line, just to name a few. The idea is to offer a range of eco-friendly items across product categories while scoring corporate branding points at the same time. Brilliant. But how do consumers determine how green a product line is overall? Maybe a store’s green jeans are certifiably eco-friendly, but its furniture is questionable. How do shoppers know what standard a company is imposing when it labels a product green?

There is nothing wrong with combining green marketing and corporate branding, but corporate labels can’t take the place of certified ecolabels. Retailers are in the business of selling products, not setting environmental standards. Ideally companies should be creating their new green product lines with products that meet the criteria of independent certifiers like EcoLogo. The corporate branding can stay, but it should be accompanied by third-party verification. Then consumers will know when they’re really buying green.

With all the negative talk around green marketing claims, L. Hunter Lovins, coauthor of “Natural Capitalism,” has decided to turn the concept on its head and point out the good in greenwashing. And she makes an interesting case. (Thanks to the Ecolabelling.org blog for the tip)

There’s a spectrum of change. First companies recognize the marketing benefits of going green. Then truly green businesses and posers alike try to take advantage of the trend by hyping green products and practices. The consuming public starts out by buying into the claims, but then questions the new marketing as activists cry foul. Ultimately companies have to back up their claims to avoid charges of greenwashing.

In other words, Lovins claims that greenwashing eventually leads to greener companies.

The argument sounds rational, but it doesn’t mean we should encourage greenwashing. Truly effective greenwashing can and often does go unnoticed, with companies proliferating their own ecolabels and generally adding to consumer confusion. On the other hand, substantiated green marketing is worth encouraging. The more companies can help customers make smart environmental choices, the more pressure there is on the market to make a range of environmental choices available. There may be some unavoidable greenwashing along the way to a greener market, but we should mitigate it wherever possible - with transparency, with positive reinforcement of eco-friendly practices, and with the help of trusted, accredited ecolabels.

Word from a customer company clued me in today to further news on the plastic bag front. In addition to San Francisco’s ban and efforts underway in Maryland, activists and legislators in the city of Santa Monica and the state of Wisconsin are also pushing for an end to traditional plastic bags in retail locations.

Diamant Corporation is promoting the news because of its biodegradable plastic alternative, which is used as food wrap and can be made into grocery bags as well. This EcoLogo-certified product (the only one currently in the category of packaging film) contains no plasticizer or chlorine and is completely recyclable. The company also just announced that it has commercial levels of inventory available, enough to produce in the range of 1.5 billion grocery bags or 16.5 billion pounds of biodegradable plastic.

Want to buy Diamant plastic wrap? The company makes it available for individuals on its website. You know you’ll be in good company too. Last month, Google ordered the plastic film as part of its commitment to environmentally-friendly practices.

Canon is creating its own green label, “Generation Green”. On the one hand, Canon should be applauded for its environmental efforts: making printers with biodegradable and recyclable parts, decreasing product packaging and cutting down on the use of toxic materials. On the other hand, why are companies increasingly introducing their own, non-regulated green labels into the market?

There are several problems with manufacturer-generated ecolabels. First, manufacturers do not have to set specific criteria and stick to them. They can decide on a case by case basis whether a product should be labeled green, giving consumers no indication of the range that an ecolabel might encompass. Second, there is no independent auditing. That’s like getting to grade your own SAT exam. Third, a company-specific ecolabel doesn’t give consumers an effective way to compare products since no company other than its creator is going to use the label.

Interestingly, Canon has several EcoLogo-certified products, which, in conjunction with the Generation Green label , does provide credibility for the company’s environmental claims.

Not surprisingly, green marketing works in the housing market as well as anywhere else. The Daily Green has a feature piece up on green renovations consumers can do to help sell a home in a down market. Among the recommendations:

• Upgrade to energy-efficient appliances and replace light bulbs throughout the house with compact fluorescents. According to one builder in North Carolina’s Triangle Park, energy-efficient homes are selling faster than their non-green counterparts.
• Give the house a fresh coat of low-VOC paint. Good for the environment, good for your health.
• Get eco-friendly flooring. In addition to the green marketing benefits, green flooring is a health improvement over old carpets which can emit allergens and toxins.

I try to catch up with Scot Case as often as possible for his insights on the state of green marketing. Scot is on the road constantly, talking to people on the front lines of green commerce and observing trends in the promotion of green products. When I spoke to him a couple weeks ago, Scot mentioned something he’s noticed in the very early days of 2008. After three conferences (in something like ten days), Scot noticed that event planners have put serious effort into creating special green sections of their shows to promote environmentally-friendly products. That’s great news, right?

Well…

The thing about these new green exhibit areas is conference organizers seem to be unclear about who to allow in and who to screen out. Put a shiny green label on your product and you’ll probably be ushered in. Greenwashing alert.

This is not to say that conference planners aren’t making a move in the right direction. It’s great to bring recognition to environmental efforts and the companies behind them. With a little tweaking to the process, these shows can be frontrunners in the green marketing space. Here are three recommendations for improving the system in the future:

1. Publish and promote specific criteria for exhibiting in a designated green area
2. Use the Six Sins of Greenwashing as a guide for screening products and share it with conference attendees
3. Review tips and tools for events on the EPA’s Green Meetings site

Continuing where Part One of this series left off, let’s look at the next major stage of activities planned for the Global Ecolabelling Network (GEN). According to Board Chairman John Polak, there are a couple of key priorities.

First, GEN needs to recapture the high ground on ecolabelling. While GEN has by and large managed to debunk the global trade concerns that were at the forefront in the 1990s (mainly that ecolabelling would act as a barrier to trade), the mindset of ecolabels as over-abundant and unreliable hasn’t entirely gone away. This is because everything is being lumped into the ecolabel category. To combat misconceptions, John says that GEN is looking at launching a media campaign. The idea is to help increase awareness of what constitutes a real ecolabel – something (like EcoLogo) that would pass the screening test of the Six Sins of Greenwashing.

Second, GEN needs to address the scope of ecolabelling. Ecolabelling has become popular because companies are looking for environmental credentials. But while today’s ecolabels address design standards, process standards and performance standards, nobody yet provides credentials for how a business operates as a whole. This is a complex issue and one around which I have trouble even imagining all the pieces. Does creating a standard for how a business operates include regulations for individual employee behavior? Does it include regulations for profit spending? How about continued rates of improvement in environmental practices? And how are different factors weighted? The issue is one I’m happy to leave to the experts at GEN.

GEN’s near-term priorities are defined by the environment (no pun intended) that exists today. Not only is there renewed interest in environmentalism as a whole; there’s also renewed interest specifically in ecolabelling among organizations like the UN and the WTO. The time is right for taking ecolabelling to the next level, and GEN could and should have a large role in that transition.

In a sign that ecolabelling has hit the big time, a new organization called Big Room has launched a consumer-accessible database of green labels at Ecolabelling.org. The goal is to help steer folks through the maze of environmental marketing claims and help them learn to distinguish between what’s green and what’s greenwashing.

Of course, creating a database of green labels is easier said than done, and the Big Room folks we spoke to have already said they plan to continue refining their data collection methods and potentially add a screening mechanism in the future. At the moment, the database includes a range of labels, from those like EcoLogo that have built up credibility over decades, to ones with little or no credible authority. One way Ecolabelling.org tries to help distinguish between the two is by including a data field on whether ecolabelling programs have been independently verified or not.

As we searched through the Ecolabelling.org database, it got us thinking again about the important elements of an effective green labeling program.

• Multi-attribute evaluation (a way to avoid the sin of the hidden trade-off) so that all aspects in the life cycle of a product are considered with regard to environmental impact
• Genuine certification of products via third-party testing and regular auditing
• Recognition by an independent ecolabelling authority like the Global Ecolabelling Network

An average consumer is going to have difficulty assessing a green label for these criteria, but that is exactly what a group like Big Room with Ecolabelling.org could do.