The menace of greenwash

Greenwash sucks. It is the bane of humanity. It is really, really bad.

This stated, it is also quite fascinating. In many ways greenwash is the story of our times. I got interested in it in February 2002. I was working for a publishing company that wanted me to start a 'CSR website'. At the time, I had no idea what Corporate Social Responsibility was. After two weeks of research, I was little the wiser.

It seemed that, for many companies, CSR was the term they gave to fantastic and bizarre claims about how great they were. How they were saving the Amazon by drilling for oil or rebuilding broken communities by sponsoring the football kit of the local kids' team that played in the shadow of their corporate headquarters. Invariably CSR related to incredibly important topics but rarely was the message in any way credible. I was perplexed and daunted. How was I going to create a viable website if CSR was going to be its content?!

After a little thought I proposed to my bosses that we should set criteria. We needed certain requirements that businesses wanting to communicate their CSR messages would need to satisfy. By asking companies to make disclosure on a range of key issues rather than focus on the few things they wanted to talk about, for example, we could establish some credibility. By doing this we could expect greater visitor numbers because, publishing more credible information, it would be a more valuable website to visit. Long before the term was widely known or used, least of all by me, the proposal I was trying to put forward was a CSR website free of greenwash.

My bosses were unmoved. Considering my options and not wanting to live with a big 'what if?' hanging round my neck for ever more, I quit to pursue the idea on my own. I have been examining greenwash on a daily basis, very closely, ever since.

The SEE Companies scheme has taken a great deal longer to create than myself or my collaborators and co-conspirators ever imagined. This is, in part, due to the insidiousness and subtle complexities of greenwash.

So what is it? Well, to give the first three lines of many on the subject under the FAQs section of the SEE Companies website: Greenwash is socially, environmentally or ethically themed corporate propaganda. Greenwash is what happens when 67%¹ of people are prepared to pay a little extra for products which meet higher ethical standards. Greenwash is the reason that 79%¹ of people believe businesses just pretend to be ethical to sell more products.

Is carbon offsetting greenwash? We have dug very deep on this subject and feel we still have more digging to do! Much of our research is available, for free, alongside Environment Q5 on www.SEEcompanies.com: 'Does your company offset its carbon dioxide emissions?', click the show/hide answering guidelines link under the question.

I plan to write more on this subject in future NC columns.

¹Ipsos MORI research for SEE Potential, Sept 2007