The history of green washing
Acaroglu, L., 2019. What Is Greenwashing? How To Spot It And Stop It. [online] Medium. Available at: <https://medium.com/disruptive-design/what-is-greenwashing-how-to-spot-it-and-stop-it-c44f3d130d5> [Accessed 19 April 2020].
In the mid 1980s when the Chevron oil company employed a series of television and print ads that they are very expensive just to persuade the public of they are a “green” company. Titled People Do is an campaign show the Chevron employees that they wanted to the protect anything that is cute and cuddly, like bears, butterflies and sea turtles.
In 1990, the commercial was very effective, where they have won an award of Effie advertising and later this became part of the study for Harvard Business School. They are famous among the environmentalists, who consider Chevron as the gold standard of green washing, where they have company practices of making entertaining sustainability claims to cover a questionable environmental record.
The name of greenwashing was originally made by environmentalist, Jay Westerfeld in 1986. in these days most obtained their news from television, radio and print media. the commereials ware really well made and shown a lot. People couldn’t easily check the the claims as there was no internet access. The company showed themselves as if they are caring and looking after the environment even as they were engaging in unstainable environment practice.
However, greenwashing had been much older. The Westinghouse’s nuclear plant division was a green washing pioneer. They were threatened by the 1960 anti-nuclear power movement. They movement had huge questions about the safety and the impact on the environment. However, the nuclear company fought back with a series of ads saying the nuclear power plants were much the cleaner and safer to the environment. They had been using a photograph where the power plant is surround by really clean lakes. while claiming that the smoke it produced was odourless, clean and safe. it can produce a huge amount of cheap electricity and get more power and be healthier than the rival coal burning plants.
Some of claims were true in 1969. However, there had been nuclear meltdowns in Michigan and Idaho, the word “safe” was arguable. Nuclear waste was a problem and continues to be a problem.
The idea of greenwashing did not start with Westinghouse. It all started when Jay Westerfeld got the idea of green washing from a towel. When he was an undergraduate student going on a trip to Fiji. Spending time at the beachcombing resort he saw a note telling the customer to pick up their towels because the ocean and the Reef are an important resource. ignoring the fact that the beachcombing resort was getting bigger and that a bigger environment problem.
In 1980 he was writing a term paper on multilculturalism, where he remembered that note on the beach and finally wrote that something like it come out greenwashing, there was a guy in his class with him now work for literary magazine and he wrote an essay about green washing. As the magazine has a large readership in nearby New York City, it wasn’t long before the term caught on the wider media. His essay finally came out a year after the launch of Chevron’s People Do campaign. As critics later pointed out many of the environment programs that Chevron sponsored the government told them had to do Chevron spent $5,000 per year on a butterfly sanctuary, but made ads promoting it costly $1 millions.
The People Do Campaign been ignored all of Chevron’s environmental record, while it was running the ads, they were violating the clean air act, the clear water act and spilling oil into the wildlife refuges. Chevron was not the only company doing this.
In 1989, the chemical company DePont had announced its new double hulled oil tanker where the ads show marine animals applauder whilst playing beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Friends of the earth pointed out this company was one of most and largerst corporate polluters in the US.
The forestry giant Weyerhauser ran ads claiming that it was important to care about the fish even as it was cutting down trees.
In the early 1990s, customers were aware of sustainability worries. In a poll the companies environmental record influenced customer purchases. The word greenwashing is now part of the English language and added to the Oxford English dictionary. Since then the change of increase. for example, in the 2015 of Nielsen poll shows that 66% of global customers willing for more to the environmentally sustainable products. Among millennials the numbers have increased to 72%.
Jason Ballard, who is an CEO of Sustainable Home Improvement Retailer Treehouse believes that the people start to become more aware of the shortage of resources and how our actions affect it. At the same time the greenwashing has become harder to tell apart, it is the dark side of a very positive development. Many companies tried to win over customer in their sustainability efforts even as the heart of what they do remained unsustainable. For example, the Home Depot and Lowes, where they both offer on-site recycling they carry on selling b products that damage the environment, such as in paint.
it is misdirection and it makes the customer focus on something small and less important than bigger polluting products
Water companies, like nestle, claim bottled water is healthy and “mother Nature is our muse”. ignoring the fact that 69% of plastics bottles one not recycled and end up in the environment. sometimes their water sources are in drought areas.
In 2013, in the middle of worries about unemployment and continuing worries about the energy sustainability, Westinghouse did a brand new commercial saying the nuclear energy is the largest source of clean air energy in the world, provides fresh air, make jobs and help sustain the communities where they operate.
Westinghouse was criticised by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011 for hiding flaws in reactor designs and submitting false information to the regulators In 2016 another Nuclear plant reactor at New York a leaked radiation into the surrounding area groundwater.
Green washing may had taken on a new form in the last decade, but it is still as murky as ever.
Fraser Thing 