Flickr: Velo_city

Pick up almost any aerosol bottle on a store shelf today and you will most likely find a little little round symbol saying “No CFCs.” This refers to chlorofluorocarbons, compounds that were once used in aerosol spray cans but were found to deplete the ozone layer. Seeing as CFCs were legally banned in the United States in 1978 – over three decades ago – it is a wonder companies still feel a need to advertise that they have found a way to make a spray can work without them.

This advertising method is a perfect example of what has come to be known as “greenwashing.” Greenwashing is the practice by which advertisers and producers of products mislead consumers in one way or another about the environmental merits of their product. Realizing that consumers are interested in making environmentally-friendly purchases, companies sometimes seek to adjust their advertisements and labeling to appeal to green consumers rather than adjusting the products themselves to be better.

A study conducted by the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice concluded that there are six distinct types of greenwashing used extensively in advertising. They refer to these different methods as the six “sins” of greenwashing:

1. The sin of the hidden tradeoff: attempts to portray a product as green based on the environmental merits of just one aspect of its production.
2. The sin of no proof: occurs any time an environmental claim is made without giving the consumer easy access to information that supports the claim.
3. The sin of vagueness: committed whenever advertisers make claims that are simply not precise enough to have any real meaning, such as “green” and “environmentally-friendly.”
4. The sin of irrelevance: committed whenever an advertiser touts a truthful, but unhelpful and irrelevant, environmentally-friendly aspect of a product (such as the CFC claim mentioned above).
5. The lesser of two evils: occurs when a claim attempts to make in inherently un-green product seem environmentally-friendly.
6. The sin of fibbing: committed when an advertiser makes an absolutely false claim.

Greenwashing has become a problem for consumers because there is not a reliable, standard third party to regulate the green claims of advertisers like there is in many other industries. Hopefully the six points above will help you to make a more educated purchase as a green consumer. If you can’t make sure every claim you hear is true, at least you can make sure it makes sense, which is the first step against greenwashing.