Is it Greenwashing? Who or what needs to change? 10 questions and 8 examples for your inner Ethicist and Private Investigator 🕵🏽‍♀️

Greenwashing, in its pure case, is making showy statements about a generous and/or responsible action, while suppressing information on the much larger, negative impact of other corporate practices. It is a form of not money laundering, but reputation laundering. It is not always as clear cut as the examples I included in the previous article. So, here are some questions to ask yourself or discuss with colleagues, and to discern if the behavior is greenwashing, a case of “learning on the job” followed by taking responsibility, and how to address the results of either case.

a) If a large company makes a small change, which achieves large impact, that’s great. The business will report on that impact… and yet, staff and people in the market know it’s a small percentage of the change they could make. Is that still authentic CS and CSR, or is it too little corporate pain? Is it green, or greenwashing, or both? The determination rests not only on the action and result, but also on the messaging, and the degree to which the company intends to continue green efforts.

For example, 100 companies emit 71% of the greenhouse gases — if the energy producers use carbon capture on a few more of their oil refinery smoke stacks, there is a large reduction in emissions, many tons of carbon are NOT released into the air. If, however, the company did carbon capture on 100% of the smoke stacks and switched to 80% or more biofuels, they would sustain conversion costs (possibly shared with or passed to the energy distributors and final customer, ever-so-slightly-possibly even reducing the executive pay multiple to reallocate to some of that conversion cost), and the reduction in emissions would be multiple times the “previously” reported impact. How do we balance climate change urgency, with the reality that we need to honor progress, to make improvement sustainable (balancing carrot and stick — aligning incentives).

b) If a company has a history of providing a valuable service which is later discovered to be polluting or labor exploitative, or otherwise destructive, how much responsibility lies with the supplier and how much lies with the buyers? What is the…

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