In an article in the Vancouver Sun, Monique Beaudin writes about label greenwashing - and the numbers are surprising. A study of company claims on labels last year found that 98 per cent of more than 1,000 products reviewed had greenwashed the information on the labels. This is driven in part by the fact that companies are realizing that consumers want to buy green or environmentally friendly products, and are willing to pay a premium for them. According to Brenda Plant, founder and managing director of the Montreal-based company ethiquette.ca, Greenwashing - where companies make vague claims about their product, or promote their products as environmentally friendly when they're not - is rampant.
Out of the products you carry in your stores, which ones are, in fact, green, as opposed to greenwashed? Do your customers know the difference? Do you? How do you deal with questions?
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Decoding green claims
By MONIQUE BEAUDIN, The Gazette
A study of company claims on labels last year found that 98 per cent of more than 1,000 products reviewed had greenwashed the information on the labels.
Since companies realized people want to buy environmentally friendly products and are willing to pay more for them, the number of "green" products has exploded. Green cleaners, clothes, shoes, toiletries and food are popping up everywhere. For many consumers though, all this choice can be a big headache.
"It's very hard for a citizen who is busy with their work, their studies, their life or their family to also do all the research to find out whether a product is genuinely green and responsible or not," said Brenda Plant, a founder and the managing director of the Montreal-based company ethiquette.ca, which for the past five years has been researching the environmental and social bona fides of hundreds of companies and products.
Five years ago, Plant was working as a consultant in the field of corporate social responsible investment. People were asking her advice about finding socially responsible mutual funds, or organic baby clothes, or running shoes that weren't made in sweatshops, she said. That's when she realized that there was a real hunger for information about sustainable products because it wasn't always clear to consumers which products were a more responsible choice. Greenwashing - where companies make vague claims about their product, or promote their products as environmentally friendly when they're not - is rampant, Plant said.
"Companies have definitely identified that consumers are interested," she said. "Companies see this as a very interesting market and they want to sell to it because they can make money there."
In fact, a study of company claims on labels last year found that 98 per cent of more than 1,000 products reviewed had greenwashed the information on the labels. Questionable claims ranged from falsely stating a product met Energy Star standards to companies creating their own official-looking logos to make consumers think they had gone through a legitimate green certification process.
"You are getting more and more claims of green, or exaggerations of the green quality of products," Plant said. "Things will say 'natural' but natural doesn't necessarily mean non-toxic. Natural is an unregulated term that can be quite misleading or doesn't really say anything at all."
Plant, and the company's three employees, thoroughly investigate the environmental and social backgrounds of different companies and products, and if they meet ethiquette's rigorous standards, add them to the company's bilingual online database. So far, 250 companies have gotten ethiquette's stamp of approval, while another 750 have gone through a preliminary vetting process. Companies pay ethiquette an "evaluation fee" to cover the research costs. Changes to how companies operate could cost them their certification if they lower their standards.
Ethiquette looks at things like whether a product is made with organic materials, if it is produced locally, if it is made by a non-profit or co-operative enterprise, and whether the company has above-average working conditions for its employees. The ethiquette team asks companies about their social and environmental performance, checks to see whether they have any credible third-party certifications already, and checks the claims with outside sources, Plant said.
"Most of the time there's no transparency on the part of companies giving information, like where the products are made and using what ingredients," Plant said. "That information is not readily available. Interpreting it is not always easy either."
The risk with the explosion in the number of products making vague green claims is that consumers can lose faith in truly sustainable products, Plant said. "If they can't trust anybody, then they abandon ship and don't make any efforts to consume in a way that is less damaging to our world," she said.
About 15,000 people - the majority of whom are women - visit the ethiquette site each month, mainly doing research prior to making a purchase, Plant said. The database includes things like school binders made of old billboards, organic beers and wedding invitations made of recycled paper.
Ethiquette is distinct, Plant said, because it considers a company's social performance - such as working conditions and fair wages - as important as its environmental practices.
"You can't just be a leader on the social or environmental front and be a laggard on the other - you don't qualify," Plant said.
While the focus at the beginning was on products and services from Quebec, ethiquette expanded to a nation-wide service in 2008. Last year it ventured further into the world of corporate social responsibility by launching ethipedia.ca, a website that focuses on the companies behind eco-friendly products. Plant said she hopes the site gives small and medium-size businesses "recipes" for how to implement sustainable business practices.
"Most consumers work in some way in an institution - small or large - that could be implementing sustainability measures," she said. "This is another way of promoting and educating on these issues."
You can find ethiquette's listing of more than 1,000 products at www.ethiquette.ca. Learn more about sustainable business at ethipedia.ca
SOURCE: Vancouver Sun
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