BusinessWeek recently had an interesting article titled “Are You Being Greenwashed?” by Sarah Rich (BusinessWeek, March 29. 2007). (Thanks Nabeel for posting that link.) 
The author picks up where Kim Severson left off in her Greenwashing piece for the New York Times, “Be It Ever So Homespun, There’s Nothin Like Spin“ (New York Times, January 3, 2007).
The BusinessWeek piece starts off by describing three levels of “greening” that products (or rather, the product / package design) can have, from the most authentic to the least authentic. The rest of the article takes another tangent and talks about how some products are now communicating, through their design, issues of sustainability and environmental impact / footprint… not just the “all-naturalness” of the ingredients.
Both authors maintain that the rustic fonts and rural “organic” imagery (think Celestial Seasons-like graphics on EVERYTHING) are almost completely played out. They both cite Timberland’s “nutrition label” (pictured here) as the future — and more substantive – direction of “green” packaging.
All this is not exactly cutting edge news for those “in the know,” but it’s still very interesting to watch this meme work it’s way through the mainstream. Just last week, E. Bruce Harrison, a PR executive who has a storied history of antagonism with environmentalist groups, wrote an op-ed piece titled, “The Drying of Greenwash“ (O’Dwyer’s Public Relations, April 19, 2007 – subscription req’d) where he declared an end to greenwashing… or at least, the use of that term.
He writes,
If you’re a corporate communicator you can still get called a greenwasher for green communication that goes into chest-beating extremism about this or that green product, comes up short of regulatory rules or is overtaken by nullifying events.
BP has become the don’t-let-it-happen-to-us exemplar, where years of progressive green messaging are hollowed by evidence and events to the contrary, and where critiques of corporate green success can drag out the board for a round of the green wash name game.
He proceeds to wave the following combination white flag / olive branch / index finger:
Joel Makower, a fellow veteran of the green scene, observed in a recent blog that some activist groups are now calling some companies greenwashers for touting their green surges, looking askance at the fact that the companies are in fact making money by growing green and that green groups will be part of the pattern.
But the fact is that he pragmatic evolution of environmental and carbon economics will do more for collaboration on societal progress than any previous set of factors.
Companies and green activists who don’t see mutual advantages in getting together on the carbon-constraint road – which as of now begins to define much of what began as a strict and contentious ecological focus – will fall behind, losing stature and influence to those who do.We’ve reached the place where “greenwashing” charges no longer hold very much water.
The proof of this is that they can be flung both ways.
As Makower has asked, isn’t there a greenwash tinge in some of the activist rhetoric – where big green talkers hope nobody mentions their big not-so-green actual lifestyles and their personal big carbon footprints?
This meme cycle is far from finished. There are parts of the world, heck, parts of this country, which take years to pick up on stuff. I predict at least five more years of frolicking cows and sheep, bees and butterflies, and earth-toney warmth on our food packaging.
[REFERENCE: "Greenwashing" is a word found in the Oxford English Dictionary (but not on my spellchecker). According to the Wikipedia entry, the word originated in the early 1990s and first appeared in Mother Jones magazine. Sourcewatch also has a good page explaining this term. ]
Filed under: Green Style, Marketing
