GREEN WASHING AND CORRUPTION

Greenwashing is a marketing spin that makes deceptive or exaggerated environmental claims.  As companies strive to create greener products, one of the biggest challenges for marketers is how to pitch those products without perceptions of greenwashing.

 

 

Coca-Cola Adding Insult to Injury

 

It’s an issue we’re seeing more and more of these days.  The Coca-Cola Company was accused of overstating the environmental benefits of its PlantBottle packaging, using marketing materials that included excessive green coloring, environmentally friendly images (butterflies, flowers, etc.) and a circular logo that mimicked the universal symbol for recycling.

Coca-Cola’s greenwashing is adding insult to injury.  Carbonated beverage consumption has been linked with diabetes, hypertension, and kidney stones, all risk factors for chronic kidney disease. Cola beverages, in particular, contain phosphoric acid and have been associated with urinary changes that promote many kidney stones.

But before companies can avoid greenwashing, they have to be able to recognize it. And in an industry where research and development are evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, that’s not always so easy.  Greenwashing often begins not as intentional deception by corporate giants but as well-meaning ideas cooked up by Madison Avenue executives who may not grasp the finer intricacies of green technologies and their benefits.

A lot of greenwashing is unintentional.  Ad agents really don’t understand this that well, and so they misguide the clients.  High-profile stories about exaggerated claims by Coca-Cola may attract the lion’s share of attention, but it’s often smaller companies, which lack the manpower to put their marketing materials through a legal litmus test, that find themselves on the receiving end of greenwashing accusations.

It’s usually the little guys who do greenwashing.  Larger companies have a dozen legal guys on staff. They have clearance from magazines. They have a long history of avoiding making deceptive claims in general.

 

Green Guides

 

The Federal Trade Commission published its first-ever Green Guides in 1992, an effort to provide a set of best practices that can help marketers avoid making deceptive green claims. In 2012, the FTC guides were updated for the first time since 1998.  Green marketing has seen a lot of changes in those years, including the introduction of phrases such as sustainable and renewable, which can serve as helpful descriptions when used accurately but can just as easily descend into empty jargon.

It’s important for marketers to make credible green claims, as they risk damaging their reputations when they don’t.  Most greenwashing disputes are resolved by the National Advertising Division (NAD), a self-regulatory body housed within the Better Business Bureau. The division keeps a running list of advertising-industry disputes. Everybody wants to stay out of court. It’s faster and cheaper.

The green efforts of companies today all too often involve fine-tuning existing products, rather than creating products with the environment in mind.  Tom’s of Maine, the all-natural toothpaste brand, has a recyclable aluminum tube, but the ultimate goal is to help companies ok brainstorm innovative products that would do away with the tube altogether, not to mention the toothbrush and the box the tube comes in. You can’t solve these problems by tweaking existing products. You can’t tweak your way to green.

Organizations and individuals are making attempts to reduce the impact of greenwashing by exposing it to the public. The Greenwashing Index, created by the University of Oregon in partnership with EnviroMedia Social Marketing, allows examples of greenwashing to be uploaded and rated by the public. The British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing has a specific section (section 49) targeting environmental claims.

According to some organizations opposing greenwashing, there has been a significant increase in its use by companies over the last decade. Additionally, it has begun to manifest itself in new varied ways. Within the non-residential building products market in the United States, some companies are beginning to claim that their environmentally minded policy changes will allow them to earn points through the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating program. This point system has been held up as an example of the gateway effect that the drive to market products as environmentally friendly is having on company policies.

The greenwashing trend may be enough to eventually effect a genuine reduction in environmentally damaging practices. 95% consumer products claiming to be green commit at least one of the Ten Sins of Greenwashing.

 

Ten Sins of Greenwashing

 

1.   Sin of the Hidden Trade-off, committed by suggesting a product is green based on an unreasonably narrow set of attributes without attention to other important environmental issues.

2.   Sin of No Proof, committed by an environmental claim that cannot be substantiated by easily accessible supporting information or by a reliable third-party certification.

3.   Sin of Vagueness, committed by every claim that is so poorly defined or broad that its real meaning is likely to be misunderstood by the consumer.

4.   Sin of Worshiping False Labels is committed when a claim, communicated either through words or images, gives the impression of a third-party endorsement where no such endorsement exists.

5.   Sin of Irrelevance, committed by making an environmental claim that may be truthful but which is unimportant or unhelpful for consumers seeking environmentally preferable products.

6.   Sin of Lesser of Two Evils, committed by claims that may be true within the product category, but that risk distracting consumer from the greater environmental impacts of the category as a whole.

7.   Sin of Fibbing, the least frequent Sin, is committed by making environmental claims that are simply false.

8.   Suggestive pictures - Images that imply a baseless green impact, such as flowers issuing from the exhaust pipe of a vehicle.

9.   Just not credible - A claim that touts the environmentally friendly attributes of a dangerous product, such as cigarettes.

10.               Gobbledygook - The use of jargon or information that the average person cannot readily understand or be able to verify.

 

Green Corruption

Corruption is a major global problem that has a direct impact on efforts to manage the world’s resources and combat climate change. Countries in South Asia, northern Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are among the most corrupt places in the world. Other countries are by no means exempt as corruption is pervasive around the world.  Greece is the most corrupt country in EU.

Corruption risks exist in political decision-making and climate financing and through the mismanagement of public funds. Where huge amounts of money flow through new and untested financial markets and mechanisms, there is always a risk of corruption.  Total global climate change investments will reach a trillion euros by 2020. The countries that are most vulnerable to climate change tend to be the most corrupt.  

A lack of government transparency is correlated with a country’s failure to provide clean water. Half of the 20 nations with the worst corruption record re located in sub-Saharan Africa, where 63 percent of the population lacks basic sanitation facilities.

Studies on the installation of solar panels in North Africa found that weak governments, bureaucracy and corruption could inflate investment costs by 20 percent. The project was supposed to cost 400 billion dollars up to its completion in 2050. However, with the 20 percent inflation every year, it will cost 1600 billions dollars by 2025!

Emissions


Carbon markets have been fraught with fraudulent activity. The European Union’s $134 billion emissions trading scheme has seen the re-sale of used carbon offsets, hacking, theft and continuing value-added tax fraud.

The UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) has been criticized because of its lack of transparency and its inability to deliver additional emissions cuts. The project developers responsible for helping poorer nations reduce their emissions under the CDM have also been subject to criticisms for exploiting the system.

Creative accounting can lead to the double counting of emissions by companies of their own reported mitigation efforts, thus nullifying the environmental integrity of the emissions reductions. It is imperative that these lessons be considered in establishing new markets, and used to improve and reform the existing mechanisms.

Forestry


The forestry sector as particularly vulnerable to corruption due to high international demand for timber, weak land ownership rights and marginalized indigenous communities.
According to World Bank estimates, each year, between $10 billion and $23 billion worth of timber is harvested illegally or comes from suspicious origins. This will have to be dealt with before the U.N. forest preservation scheme known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) gets the $28 billion a year funding.



Water


Corruption is undermining efforts to bring water to billions of people around the world suffering from scarce water resources. Corruption from petty bribes to corporate manipulation of public water services has slowed progress in solving the world’s water problems.

Corruption increases costs and reduces efficiency and this is a reason why private operators are strongly motivated to overcome corruption.  Forty percent of water sector finances are lost to corruption. That would mean a projected loss of about $20 billion from needed investments in sub-Saharan Africa over the coming decade.

Corruption raises the price for water services between 10 and 30 percent worldwide each year. Based on the worst-case scenario, corruption could raise the cost of improving water supply by $48 billion.

A prime example of widely publicized corruption involves Africa’s multi-billion dollar water transfer effort, known as the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. The plan was to supply water to the industrial heartland of South Africa and to generate energy for impoverished Lesotho. The project also presented water officials with opportunities to increase their personal wealth. In 2002, Lesotho courts sentenced the project’s chief executive to prison for accepting bribes from 18 multinational companies that were vying for construction contracts.

Corruption compounds the problems associated with water scarcity. Corruption in water can lead to skewed and inequitable water resources allocation, to uncontrolled and illegal pollution, to groundwater over-extraction, and to degraded ecosystems. In many cases, these impacts in turn result in reduced resilience and adaptability to the impacts of climate change.

China


In China, water is also a serious problem and so is corruption. Corruption frustrates environmental protection efforts and worsens the country’s already severely polluted air and waterways.

Some local government leaders directly interfere in environmental law enforcement by threatening to remove, demote and retaliate against environmental officials. The failure to abide by the law, lax law enforcement, and allowing lawbreakers to go free are still serious problems in many places.

In China, the class system operates on several levels. At the top of the socio-economic scale are the princelings, children of important party officials, who have become multimillionaires by trading on their contacts. Then there are bureaucrats, who enjoy attractive lifestyles funded by the people's taxes and bribes.  The princelings use greenwashing to hoodwink consumers all over the world.

In China, energy and water issues are inextricably linked. Energy production is a water-intensive activity, and not just in hydropower dams. China is the world's biggest power consumer and has the largest energy system. It is also the largest greenhouse gas emitter. If things don't change, China will become a major energy importer by 2035, having to import fuel to provide 40 percent of its power.

China is facing enormous issues, but Xi Jinping has developed a strong will to address environmental problems. This comes after decades of ignoring the environment in favor of industrial growth. Those policies allowed polluting practices to continue, ruining air and water, and creating cancer villages where people suffer high rates of the disease.

Conflicts have cropped up over water usage. Agriculture uses 70 percent of the massive nation's water, but contributes just 10 percent to the national GDP. Industrial consumption is growing, and the redistribution of water from agriculture to industry has led to protests by thousands of small farmers.

China is also facing water-distribution problems related to geography, because 47 percent of its population is in northern China, along with 65 percent of its cultivated land, but less than 20 percent of the nation's water supply is there. Water prices have been kept artificially low, which has kept prices down for users. But that has also discouraged conservation practices, such as low-water irrigation and the development of water-saving technology.

The Chinese government has admitted for the first time that cancer villages exist, as decades of pollution take their toll on the health of Chinese citizens. For years environmental campaigners in China have said that cancer rates in villages near factories and polluted rivers are far higher than they should be.

Toxic and hazardous chemical pollution has caused many environmental disasters, cutting off drinking water supplies, and even leading to severe health and social problems such as cancer villages.  Many chemicals are produced and consumed in China, which are banned in many developed nations.

China is facing a grave situation in terms of chemical pollution control, including a lack of pollution risk control by enterprises, a lack of policies to stop the use of highly toxic and dangerous chemicals and insufficient pollution monitoring by the authorities.

Over 90% of the groundwater in cities is polluted to different degrees. Of 118 major cities, 64 have seriously contaminated groundwater supplies. This is highly alarming, as 70% of China’s population relies on groundwater for their drinking water.  320 million people are without access to clean drinking water in China and 190 million people are drinking water severely contaminated with hazardous chemicals.

Out of the 7,555 chemical and petrochemical projects surveyed, 1,354 were located on the banks and shores of rivers, lakes and reservoirs; 2,489 were next to densely populated cities or areas; 535 were on major tributaries of key rivers; and 280 were on the upper reaches of protected drinking water-source regions.

Poor environmental regulations, weak enforcement and local corruption mean that factories can discharge their waste water directly into rivers and lakes.  It is mainly water pollution, which is the cause of the high rates of cancer in areas where factories discharge chemicals into rivers, which have earned these settlements their name of cancer villages.

Cancer is now China’s biggest killer, with an 80% rise in mortality from the disease in the last 30 years.  If things continue like this, all Chinese are doomed. If the issue of ground water pollution is not properly solved, not only will it kill people but it will also drag down the entire healthcare system because of the number of cancer patients it causes.

As well as water pollution, air pollution is also a major problem in China. Lung cancer rates continue to mushroom, because of air pollution as well as the number of people who smoke.  The main cause of Chinese air pollution is coal and particular its use in generating electricity. Coal supplies 80% of the country's electricity and 70% of its energy, as well as the lion's share of its air pollutants.

Beijing and other major cities have been blanketed in a toxic smog, which has soared past levels considered dangerous by the World Health Organization.The smog sparked public outcry and has led to public debate about the cost of China’s rush for economic development at seemingly any price.



USA


The Center for Biological Diversity led litigation to protect six endangered species from Montana to Alabama. These lawsuits charged high level officials with political interference after they stripped protections for 55 endangered species and 8.7 million acres of land. The government ignored the recommendations of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and slashed critical habitat proposals. The depth of corruption within the Department of the Interior impacts hundreds of endangered species and millions of acres of wetlands and wildlife habitat.

Corruption adds dramatically to the costs of protecting the environment, and increased costs slow the adoption rate of low carbon technologies.  At a time when governments are stretched beyond their fiscal limits, we cannot allow graft to undermine environmental protection.

 

Government Should Not Intervene in Greenwashing

 

You cannot trust Bin Laden to fight terrorism!  Similarly, we cannot trust government, the #1 polluter on Earth, to fight greenwashing.  The cost of government regulation is truly staggering, and it’s a barometer of how free we are to pursue our own interests and to determine the course of our own lives, independent of kleptocrats and the cancer of socialism. The cost of regulations is one trillion dollars in USA and two trillion euros in Fourth Reich (EU) every year. The global cost of regulation is six trillion euros every year. Financial costs are not the only burden.

Regulations result in a tremendous loss of one of our most valuable and limited resources, time. The private sector is spending over 10 billion hours a year just to meet government paperwork demands in USA, and 20 billion hours in Fourth Reich. It is no wonder that regulation discourages the creation of new businesses, new jobs, new products, and new services. Starve the beast by fighting taxes.

Any government intervention inevitably leads to more interventions in order to address the crises that are generated by the previous interventions. Ultimately the crises continue getting so bad that the government ends up taking over the entire sector. "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." Ronald Reagan considered those nine words the most terrifying in the English language. And the government has been offering a lot of such help lately.

 

QUESTIONS

 

Why most people are not aware of the harm of Coca-Cola?

Have you noticed any greenwashing in the products you use?

Why are Chinese products so cheap?

Why nobody can rein in the princelings?

Why Distance Learning is a green product?

Would you welcome regulation against greenwashing?

What happened to the rivers and forests of ancient Athens?

Why, in average, capitalist countries have greener products than socialist countries?

Have you noticed any gobbledygook in green marketing?

Does political corruption in your country affect greenwashing?

Green investments and green jobs are stupid socialistic ideas that deviate resources from more profitable investments and more productive jobs.  Climate change is heliogenic, not anthropogenic!  Basil Venitis, venitis@gmail.com, http://themostsearched.blogspot.com, @Venitis