Don’t Commit These Six Sins of Green Washing

Green packaging is a trend that all businesses should strive to follow. According to the University of Texas at El Paso, packaging materials made up 31% of municipal solid waste. “Food packaging accounts for almost two-thirds of total packaging waste by volume.”

As far as food packaging goes, you can reduce packaging materials used per unit by “…using thinner gauges of packaging materials (i.e., lightweighting),” or using larger package sizes since they “…use less packaging per unit volume….”

According to a study by the California Polytechnic State University, “…98% of products in North America were guilty of one of the six sins of Greenwashing.” Greenwashing is when a company misleads the consumer into thinking their products or practices are environmentally-friendly, when in reality they are not. To avoid Greenwashing, don’t do any of the following:

1. Hidden Trade-offs: Stating one or more environmentally-friendly attributes of your product while ignoring other factors that are significantly environment-impacting. A good example of this is stating that a plastic bottle is environmentally-friendly because it uses reused plastics, but doesn’t disclose that the process of reusing the plastic involves emissions of harmful greenhouse gases.
2. No proof: Statements can’t be backed with third party proof or certification.
3. Vagueness: Slapping a very environmentally-general statement on your product without further definition of how your product conforms to the statement.
4. Fibbing, False Labels: Giving the impression that your product is third-party certified, when it is not.
5. Irrelevance: Passing off something as environmentally-friendly, when it isn’t. Stating that your product contains no arsenic – even though arsenic is illegal.
6. Lesser of Two Evils: Your product is harmful to the environment, by nature, yet you state it is environmentally friendly just because it is less environmentally-detrimental than most products in that category.

Do your part to save the environment by ensuring your green procedures and materials are not misleading.