{"id":5494,"date":"2019-10-11T23:57:28","date_gmt":"2019-10-11T16:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/?p=5494"},"modified":"2020-03-10T00:01:12","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T17:01:12","slug":"a-wash-of-green-paint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/a-wash-of-green-paint\/","title":{"rendered":"A Wash of Green Paint"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Greenwashing Muddies Product Waters<\/i><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Story by: Jace Puckett<\/strong><\/p>\n

2019 has been a relevant year for the green movement. In August, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg traveled to New York to attend the UN Climate Action Summit. As talk about climate change continues, we have seen a trend of companies within the last decade that market their products to be environmentally conscious. From Hydro flasks and K\u00e5nken bags to reusable metal straws, numerous products have been advertised as being \u201cgreen\u201d when in fact that is not always the case. A certain marketing tactic called \u201cgreenwashing\u201d makes it difficult to tell what is or isn\u2019t environmentally friendly. A spin on the word \u201cwhitewashing,\u201d the act of concealing unpleasant facts about a person or organization, greenwashing is the act of disguising products and services as \u201cgreen\u201d or \u201ceco-friendly\u201d when in fact they aren\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c[Greenwashing is] inevitable because there\u2019s a market advantage to having a product that\u2019s differentiated by its green properties,\u201d says Caleb Crow, the Energy Conservation Manager of the Office of Energy and Sustainability at Austin Community College. \u201cIf a green label is…raising the cost of whatever you\u2019re talking about, that is a competitive disadvantage for that product, compared to a similar product that maybe didn\u2019t go through a vetted process, but puts a similar-looking but rather meaningless label on the product to confuse a buyer, and then that product is, therefore cheaper, even if it\u2019s in other ways similar. So greenwashing has a negative effect on the marketplace because people will be motivated by cost in many instances.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Research on the effects of greenwashing on buyer decisions is limited, but there is certainly a demand for green products, to which companies are responding for better or worse. A 2010 study done by Richard Dahl suggests that buyer skepticism can make these misleading advertisements \u201crisky ventures\u201d for companies, many of which are simply trying to profit as much as possible. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s been a lot of analysis of greenwashing, and the public has caught on to it,\u201d Claudette Juska, a research specialist at Greenpeace, commented. \u201cI think in general people have become skeptical of any environmental claims. They don\u2019t know what\u2019s valid and what isn\u2019t, so they disregard most of them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The burden of proof often falls on the party making the claim, but several companies commit what has been termed the \u201csin of no proof,\u201d one of seven \u201csins of greenwashing\u201d named by TerraChoice. Because companies fail to provide proof of their environmentally-friendly claims or lie altogether (\u201csin of fibbing\u201d), it may be up to buyers to determine which products are green and which are brown, the opposite of green. <\/span><\/p>\n

However, buyers don\u2019t have to assume full responsibility: \u201cIn terms of [the] Energy and Sustainability office for ACC, we\u2019re doing research on individual product lines that we can then refer to individual buyers,\u201d Crow said. \u201cWe have the benefit of being able to think ahead and research.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Greenwashing Muddies Product Waters Story by: Jace Puckett 2019 has been a relevant year for the green movement. In August, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg traveled to New York to attend the UN Climate Action Summit. As talk about climate change continues, we have seen a trend of companies within the last decade that market their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4198,"featured_media":5495,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[53,956,957,441],"class_list":["post-5494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-accent-news","tag-current-events","tag-economy","tag-news-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5494\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5495"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}