Five Ways to Spot Greenwashing
What is “greenwashing”?
It’s fancy marketing through storytelling and imagery. Research shows that nearly 50% of consumers are willing to pay more for ‘sustainable’ and ‘green’ products - - and among Gen Zers that rate is nearly 68%. But what we are often buying is an illusion. It’s the cosmetic industry version of calling something ‘craft beer’ when it’s made by Anheuser-Busch, but the left the Goose Island or Elysian label on it.
Greenwashing is selling the story that we are doing something good with our purchase. It’s co-opting buzzwords to sell mass-made products that aren’t really living up to the claims.
Any company can call a product natural or clean but they are defining that term on their own conditions, because there is no standard or regulations!
Greenwashing makes words meaningless:
Although we all know the meaning of words like “natural”, “organic”, “clean”, and “hypoallergenic”, the FDA doesn’t regulate these descriptors in beauty products like it does in food products. From the FDA’s website
Five things to look for:
Hidden Parent Company (example: LeLabo likes us to think they create their blends to order and are a small, personalized apothecary - they are owned by Estee Lauder with $14.9 BILLION dollars in sales and nearly 10% of the global market | source: Forbes online article 2020)
Too many options: One clue a brand might not be as sustainable as they say is that they have 100s or 1000s of options - think ‘fast fashion’ and ‘trendy’ products. H&M calling their Conscious Collection ‘conscious’ really just makes us feel better - but they aren’t very transparent about their practices (another clue things might not be as sustainable or as we are lead to believe).
Vague buzzwords (Yes, things can be organic, verified and certified by a reliable source, but items can also say anything the want - and its also true that the label is just a transaction where the company pays for ‘certification’.) Naturally Derived isn’t the same as ‘natural’.
Messaging doesn’t align with what you’re seeing (example: FIJI Water - Fiji’s marketing tries extremely hard to position this product as part of nature. Their slogan “bottled at the source, untouched by man” coupled with imagery of tropical flora and deep blue water work to paint Fiji as a natural, even exotic, product. The reality, of course, is that Fiji water is bottled in plastic and can take 450 years to break down in the environment.
Idyllic Imagery: Pretty pictures sell. And ExxonMobile, Shell Oil Co. and Monsanto all know this! But it’s not just the multinationals that do this. Small businesses do this too, images of plants and nature are often short hand for the natural vibe you want- read the labels. You might not know the Latin name for rose, aloe or lemon, but You DO Know that diisononyl phthalate (DINP), diisodecyl phthalate (DIDP) and dipropylheptyl phthalate (DPHP) don’t truly sound ‘natural’.
