There are reports of new UK legislation promising to make fraudulent environmental claims – greenwashing – more difficult to justify, with fines based on company turnover, and individuals potentially facing fines of up to £300,000.
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A few weeks ago, we published an article about ethical specification. One thing that specifiers need is trust in the organisations that manufacture and distribute the equipment to be specified. It means that all specifiers need to be aware of, and sensitive to, greenwashing.
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A definition of GREENWASHING:
Misleading or deceptive publicity disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.
Most greenwashing is perceived as a marketing activity, over-stated environmental claims relating to product manufacture and performance. But a successful marketing campaign leads to sales of those products. In the lighting industry, poor environmental performance goes on and on, for as long as the product is in use – and beyond.
What kind of greenwashing claims do we see regularly:
- 100% of anything – often recycling rates. Very little material specification is truly 100% recycled. Its a claim that needs to be challenged.
- Zero carbon – is a claim that needs examination and is best ratified by a third-party analysis of what’s being said. And beware of carbon-offset schemes, some of which are already under investigation for over-valuing their environmental worth..
- Zero waste – needs to be qualified. Zero waste from where to where; from what to what. It might be suggested that zero waste is only possible from a company that doesn’t make anything – and even that would need to be tested against their activity in the overall supply chain.
- No plastic packaging – and the end of bubble-wrap. But there will always be some packaging, and the replacement may not be plastic but that doesn’t mean it’s green. Check again.
- Circular economy production – what is? All of it? Some of it? One fixture from a catalogue of hundreds? Wearing the t-shirt doesn’t necessarily get a company over the line. And what’s being re-circulated? It’s a hot topic for the lighting industry at the moment. Some of it is true. Not all.
And if you want to turn this into a party game, you can get everyone around the table and ask them for their examples of greenwashing – because we know there’s a lot more.
To be generous to a lot of companies, their greenwashing isn’t a deliberate attempt to defraud their customers, it’s just the semantics of marketing that upgrades product beyond it’s natural non-green state. It’s about what is not being said; the stuff being highlighted casts a deep shadow on what’s not talked about.. So bring a torch. Better still, work with manufacturers who provide independent assessments of their business practices. Let them provide the torches themselves!
Why talk about this now?
News reaches us that greenwashing could be about to become very expensive for some businesses. New powers will allow the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to impose direct civil penalties on companies who make misleading environmental claims.
And our friends in the EU will be tabling a new law in the coming weeks proposing fines for companies making unsubstantiated environmental claims. For example, France has already introduced laws requiring companies that are claiming carbon-neutrality for products to provide reports on all greenhouse emissions of those products – for their entire lifecycle. That can only mean that we’ll see no more claims of carbon-neutrality for luminaires, unless the company is certain that the electricity generated to drive the product is carbon-neutral.
Serious offences of greenwashing would also be breaches of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and that’s legislation that would bring any suppler, including wholesalers, within reach of the Act.
Details of the new bill are to be placed before the UK parliament shortly.
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