What is Green? What is Greenwash?

So what is “green”? It is about being aware of what we are using and even more importantly what we are wasting. It is about how big our environmental and carbon footprint is and not using more than our fair share.

“Green” is the new black – it is now a fashion in marketing. This should not surprise us because we know that people buy based on emotion and all the recent surveys show that over 90% of Australians are worried about the environment and more than half of us are prepared to pay more for products and services that we perceive as “green” and perceive is the danger word.

Marketers sell on emotion. That is their job but marketing people and business managers need to be aware that false advertising is illegal and the government has tightened the area with new legislation, Green Marketing and the Trade Practices Act, November 2007 and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has launched a crackdown on advertising that cannot be backed up wirh evidence. There are very large fines and they have already been used.

Greenwash is fraud, the ACCC is attacking it, so what is “green”, and where are the grey areas we can fall into where we have exaggerated? We all need to be aware of the consequences.

The ACCC are concerned about the use of emotive images such as frogs, dolphins and pandas. They want to know what the relevance is to the product or service provided. They are also concerned about the use of words like Eco and Enviro and want to know if you can prove you have a right to use these terms. They are warning business about vague phases, such as green, safe for the environment, environmentally preferred, energy efficient and recyclable, which could mislead consumers and they frown on the use of scientific language because the public may not understand it and be misled.

The ACCC guidelines specifically warn against unnecessary claims like this “product is CFC free” because CFC is illegal so all product is CFC free and the claim is irrelevant

One result of businesses wanting to demonstrate their “green” credentials is a whole range of product and environmental certifications with uncertainty about what these mean and even whether the certifications themselves may be a form of greenwashing. This is further confused because some of these certification bodies have set themselves up as “not for profit” organisations which is nice image marketing but every certification they offer feeds into a profit making series of companies. Or is this “profitwash”.

These certifying bodies include Good Environmental Choice Australia (GECA), Ecospecifier and Eco-Buy. While there is an International Standard for this it is not adhered to in Australia. Instead the certifiers mostly certify “along the guidelines of” that standard leaving very real questions about how the standards are audited, who audits them and how transparent the process is.

The Federal Government has Greenhouse Friendly – at least we know who we are dealing with there and we know it is genuinely fee for service costing not a “profitwash” organisation.

Several Industry Associations have their own standards and while some are very rigorous, others are merely a tick the checklist by untrained auditors who are not independent.

It is all very confusing and people just want to buy something with a green tick and feel comfortable that they are doing the right thing.

Some fisheries are certified to Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) which has been set up jointly between World Wildlife Fund and a British supermarket chain. MSC has very credible auditing requirements but in Australia it very much overlaps the Environment Protection, Biodiversity and Conservation Act which a legal requirement if fishers are exporting and unfortunately it does not certify the workplace practice in the boats, sheds and processors.

ISO 14001 is certainly the most reputable ‘green” certification partly because it is the International Standard for environmental management with well trained and independent auditors who are also internationally qualified and recognised.

The other real advantage of ISO 14001 is to the sustainability of the business itself. Instead of just adding an overhead onto the business it helps save money as well as the environment because it is about managing the practices and behaviour throughout the business. It is about identifying “issues” and continually improving. A business with ISO 14001 can make a mistake but needs to be able to identify how and why that was possible and demonstrate to the auditor that you will prevent it from happening again.

As a consumer, you can be confident that buying from an ISO 14001 company is buying from a business with a robust and recognised certification and as a business person wanting to demonstrate environmental responsibility you have an internationally recognised certification and all the provable green marketing and positioning plus a means of saving money and helping your business.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Sustainable Business. 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.