Greenwashing: do you do it?

Climate change is like the sun - you can ignore it, but it isn’t going away. Although the the passing of QEII, the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine have knocked global warming off the front pages, and governments - especially the UK’s - are prevaricating about what they know needs to be done, the threat posed by catastrophic climate change is growing.

It has to be said that celebrities are hardly setting a great example. Kylie Jenner’s infamous 17 minute flight was rightly condemned as showing “absolute disregard for the planet”, but various studies have suggested that the CO2 emissions from her private jet were lower than Taylor Swift’s who has, in the first seven months of this year, emitted the same amount of what, on average, 1,184 people do in a year. All of which provokes the inevitable thought: why should I bother?

And yet a university study says that is nonsense. Even as individuals, if we make a series of lifestyle changes, we could reduce carbon emissions by 25%. The key changes we need to make vary from the problematic (living without a car) to the eminently manageable (using renewable energy, encouraging staff to use public transport, taking one less long-haul flight a year).

That is not a bad outcome in itself but what’s more, such changes can help generate momentum, encouraging peers, competitors and customers to make sustainable choices. As David Kester, managing director of the strategic design consultancy DKA, says: “This is an existential crisis for humanity that will not be solved by a single innovation but by a thousand innovations. What we need is an army of innovators with solutions to resolve this.” So, no matter how insignificant your individual actions might seem - whether it be collecting and recycling customers’ waste or ensuring that your printer supplier is reclaiming yours - it really is making a difference.

As Friends of the Earth eloquently puts it: “Individual action doesn’t detract from systemic and structural change. It deepens and expands it. In other words, individual action can be part of the behaviour change process.” The charity goes on to say that we shouldn’t let other behaviour - whether by celebrities or companies - make us apathetic, for “time and time again, caring, protest and campaigning has led to significant social and structural change”

So how do print service providers make a difference? A good start, as Friends of the Earth indicate, is by avoiding the language of ‘greenwashing’. The word was coined back in 1986 by American environmental activist Jay Westerveld in an essay on the hotel industry. Westerveld was distinctly unimpressed by the increasingly common practice in the industry of encouraging guests to reuse towels to protect the planet when, in reality, the real goal was to reduce laundry costs. This eco-friendly attitude was not, he noted, reflected in the minimal efforts to reduce energy usage.

So, if you are not to be accused of similar hypocrisy, terms such as ‘green’, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘sustainable’ need to be backed up with facts. The evidence could be the appropriate certification or a link to your website, and your mission statement in sustainability, so that customers can make a judgement for themselves. In a nutshell, the more specific you can be about your present carbon impact, how you try to minimise your environmental impact and what your future goals are, the better.

Environmentally aware buyers will ask themselves whether a print service provider is committing one of the seven deadly sins of greenwashing, as identified by the consultancy Terra Firma. These comprise vagueness, lack of proof, hidden trade-offs (claiming a product or service is green based on a very narrow set of attributes and ignoring all others), false labels (of which more later), irrelevance (quoting an impressive sounding statistic that really has no bearing on a product’s environmental impact), declaring that something is the lesser of two evils (a car using unleaded petrol may be greener than one running on diesel but it is not eco-friendly in any real sense) and outright lies (which, fortunately, are less common than they used to be.)

While achieving net zero emissions by 2050 is a laudable aim, businesses - especially large public companies in, for example, the retail and fmcg sectors - are looking for something more compelling that doesn’t feel like greenwashing. Many net zero strategies fail to convince because, when you look beyond the headline pledge, the company concerned seems to talk a lot about offsetting and less about reducing emissions (the oil and gas companies are particularly bad at this).

Ideally, according to America’s Sustainable Green Printing Partnership, your statement should cover six key areas: energy efficiency (which, if you broadened the definition somewhat to ‘resource efficiency’ could also include water), waste reduction and recycling, environmental compliance, responsible labour practices, process efficiencies and operational excellence. It’s probably worth exploring a couple of these areas in more detail.

Traditionally, sustainability has been all about the environment but, during the pandemic and lackdowns, a broader agenda called ESG (Environmental and Social Goals) gained momentum. The public became critical of companies that failed to look after their staff in difficult times and that attitude has persisted.

There are plenty of examples of companies continuing with irresponsible labour practices - P&O Ferries being the most notorious example - but these employers are more likely to suffer a backlash from consumers, brands and, as we have increasingly seen, regulators and governments. Whether you think the British government was really as tough on P&O as it claimed to be or not, the fact that a Conservative administration felt obliged to make the effort is emphatic proof of a change in the public mood.

And what of operational excellence? This is basically the bit where you talk about your ongoing commitment to sustainability and outliner future plans and commitments. Many wide-format print service providers have already begun this journey with some simple steps - environmental accreditation, carbon auditing, electric vehicles, recycling materials and waste. As part of this process, it is imperative that printers identify, interrogate and use the right suppliers.

What, for example, are the likely lifetime emissions of that new wide-format printer you’re eyeing up? (And by lifetime, we mean including the emissions produced during manufacture.) Some suppliers are better at providing the information than others but the more often they are asked, the more likely they are to seek some answers. Many printer suppliers, notably HP, offer schemes to take back printer waste, not just used cartridges but the machine itself. This is exactly the kind of detail that adds authenticity to your environmental stance, persuading clients that you aren’t just saying the right things.

There is a visual dimension to greenwashing too. One of the most egregious corporate examples is BP which still, in its marketing campaigns, has tried to rebrand itself with the slogan ‘Beyond Petroleum’. In 2000, this repositioning was symbolised in a new logo in which the traditional shield was replaced with a sunburst, an emblem that had long been used by the German Green Party. This exercise seemed a little cynical - especially when ‘The Guardian’ revealed, in 2015, that many of the group’s investments in low carbon technology and green energy had been sold off. Yet more recently, BP has sold some major fossil fuel operations leading some analysts to conclude that it is finally getting serious about renewable energy.

To be fair to BP, the group’s greenwashing looks pretty mild when compared to the likes of Volkswagen (which once assured us that “Diesel has really cleaned up its act” even while it was cheating emissions tests. The American bedding company Moonlight Slumber was in a class of its own when it came to greenwashing, promoting its mattresses with a Green Safety Shield icon it had invented itself! Funnily enough, the regulators took a dim view of this practice, and ordered the firm to drop the label.

This is one reason why print service providers may eschew the obvious colour when trying to emphasise their environmental strategy. Let’s face it, turning your logo green is not exactly subtle is it? Instead of emphasising your commitment, it may lead more discerning print buyers to conclude that you are protesting too much.

The best way to avoid being accused of greenwashing is not to make claims that you can’t substantiate, be clear about your goals and admit where you have to do better. Customers will find that far more credible than the kind of over-promising that has, over the past decades, eroded our faith in politicians. So let’s all get to work - we have a planet to save.