Sympathy for the Devil: Does greenwash anxiety prevent action?
We need to show some love to the 'Greenwashers'.
I can’t lie; I have a bloody good job! In my day to day, I assist and encourage hundreds of ambitious people from great organisations to make a positive impact on the world. The desire to successfully nurture businesses to become promoters of justice, equity, diversity & inclusion, defenders of human rights, climate activists, circularity & environmental stewards, and collective impact-driven organisations is a movement growing at a remarkable pace compared to the 20th century. Rightfully so, but boy, that’s a lot of systemic issues to tackle, and there’s one brutish barrier that pops up time and time again.
In essence, it’s over-preparation. For organisations to go down this path beneficially, they need to credibly say they are contributing to promoting these values in the systems they operate in. Over-preperation to make sure one has researched and planned around all the tools, certifications, methodologies, and standards possible can often prevent programs of organisational change from even starting. Like overwatered seeds washed out and stuck in the mud, they don’t get the opportunity to germ and sprout. It's all down to C-suite risk aversion. It's a kind of corporate anxiety. A strategic unease. Boardroom butterflies. It’s the fear of greenwashing.
Greenwashing is when companies or organisations make exaggerated, or sometimes out-and-out false, claims about how their operations or products are environmentally sound or holistically sustainable. It's rooted in the term ‘Whitewashing’, which is the act of covering up or glossing over crimes, injustices, or misgivings to retain or improve one's reputation. The derivative of this is when cheap white paint is used as a shortcut to hastily give a clean, fresh, and new appearance to something that underneath is dilapidated and of poor quality. Like when you move into that pristine new flat for 40% of your wages, only to find out the newly painted walls are full of damp and mold.
Greenwashing is the same, but the paint smells like a cheap pine air freshener. It attempts to conjure a stoic feeling that the consumer is ‘Being kind to nature,’ ‘Being good to the planet,’ or ‘Helping the environment.’ Through misleading branding and imagery of trees, oceans and animals or plastic cardboard-esque packaging; ambiguous labels like “100% sustainable” or “planet friendly; hidden trade-offs like using paper straws which require way more water to produce than plastic straws; or claiming to be the ‘Lesser of two evils’, greenwashing paints over the real damage that a product or service does and how an organization contributes to our broken socio-ecological global systems.
One recent example of this was H&M, who, last year, were accused of greenwashing. According to an investigation by Quartz Network, H&M was reported to have provided inaccurate information about its ‘Conscious Choice’ collection to its consumers. The company used a legitimate and academically reviewed tool - environmental scorecards from the Higg Sustainability Profile - to measure how their garment’s materials impacted their carbon, water, and energy consumption compared to conventional materials. Great initiative, right? Sure! Until Quartz discovered that half of the scorecards grossly exaggerated the product's ecological integrity. For instance, a garment that required 20% more water than average to produce was said to use 20% less water. H&M attributed this to a technical error. Following these findings, a consumer, rightfully so, filed a class-action lawsuit against H&M for false advertising.
H&M may have done this deliberately or, seeing as H&M could have happily disclosed this data to Quartz, H&M may have genuinely made a mistake. But like Godley and Creme said, ‘When things go wrong, they really go wrong!’ Customer trust in sustainability initiatives erodes, and the ever more skeptical consumer is becoming wrier to see where the paint doesn’t stick. Mindshare’s 2022 Our Reality Check report claims almost half (49%) of the public now think that brands are guilty of greenwashing. To greenwash and hope nobody takes notice is business suicide in today’s market. However, if you are trying to make a change, the intense criticism that belies a team when their efforts aren’t up to scratch makes the pressure so fierce to get it right. The headlines always call out failures and rarely celebrate sustainability best practices. Heck, if the risk of bad publicity is higher than the rewards benefiting the business, trying to tackle these issues may seem like going in the wrong direction.
So here’s the Cache 22 we need to break: Businesses, overwhelmed by a customer base ready to cancel their organisation for one mistake, don't take action because of uncertainty about how to be truly authentic and credible. Because they don't take action, they risk falling behind in the sustainable transition and the race to net zero, losing customers who value ethical trade.
Teams may feel like they need to figure out where to start or that their actions won't make a meaningful difference in the face of our signifcant systemic issues. This fear of being accused as the greenwasher is worse than greenwashing itself, as it prevents even the inception attempt to take action and change for good.
It may sound easy enough, but the key is to just start with a positive outlook and without fear of missing targets or falling shy of perfection. Implementation, not planning, is most important when considering sustainable business management. Every action counts, no matter how small, and in the end, it simply boils down to approach. If your organsation is creating a sustainability programme so that products sell well, so your services will be more marketable, so your brand has better optics, if that is your end goal, you will fail. If your organisation is transparent, open to learning and improving, and genuinely endevours to be a better company for all its stakeholders and our planet's stakeholders, your business will grow, thrive and become regenerative.
We must remember that sustainable business management isn’t a linear tickbox deliverable for an organisation to do in a few months. It's a cyclical process that involves both identifying where you have direct control or influence of existing or emerging impacts and reaching for ambitious targets to reduce them, fostering a regenerative outlook for all stakeholders. It's about how your organisation intervenes in the systems it interacts with to leverage change. (See Image)
So, rather than letting greenwashing anxiety bolster inaction, we must approach sustainable business management with a sense of empowerment and agency. Educating your internal team on climate and socio-ecological issues and making informed collective choices can help tackle the overwhelm and uncertainty of organisational change. Additionally, sustainable sourcing - seeking out and supporting suppliers and partnerships prioritising the prosperity of socio-ecological systems - can help meet your goals and shift industry standards and trends in the wider market. Ultimately, the more organisations take action and are open to scrutiny, the broader our collective knowledge will be to take further action.
We shouldn’t see imperfect strategic action as ‘greenwashing’ or be afraid to be called out. We must take action, be transparent, and allow ourselves to improve continually. If we don’t start somewhere, we will never make the changes the world needs.