Get Rid of Greenwashing

This Earth Day, let’s get rid of greenwashing. We’re fed up with companies pretending their products are green to dupe paying customers. Examples abound for all types of greenwashed products in the U.S., from shampoos and detergents, to meats and vegetables, to electronics and clothes, to cars and oil products, and even to plastics (water bottles and trash bags!) and paper products(!).

American consumers are all too eager to buy products with a green sheen, and companies are happy to serve the market with products that deceive with “green” or “natural” labels or packaging design. Consumers are being “greenmailed,” if you will, into buying products that claim to be more environmentally friendly than competitors. Well, they aren’t.

“Natural” and “all natural” mean nothing. Plastics aren’t green. Paper products, unless made primarily with recycled material, are not green. (For example, the super soft toilet paper increasingly found in grocery stores is so soft because it is made from ancient trees that are hundreds of years old.) Shampoos, conditioners, lotions and makeup made with petroleum or coal products are not “natural.” Laundry and dish detergents that contain countless toxic chemicals cannot be “green.” There’s not such thing as a “green” car. Even Priuses and electric cars run on fossil fuel and are manufactured with precious metals often ripped from the earth. Home appliances that save energy are better for the environment than clunker predecessors, but they still use substantial amounts of energy, usually made by burning fossil fuels. The list goes on and on.

As consumers, we expect more from these companies than the way they shamelessly hawk their environmentally degrading products. Companies, please drop the pretenses and be honest about your products’ impact on the environment. Show us a little transparency for the customers who spend millions on your products.

We know companies are hesitant to do this on their own because of American capitalism’s twisted incentives. So, let’s urge them on. Large companies are increasingly responsive through Twitter and other social media outlets. So, let’s call them out and tell them that their “all-natural” dish soaps and pesticides are ruining our waterways, that their paper products are crushing our most pristine forests, that their plastic is poisoning our sea life and that their appliances are burning up our atmosphere. It’s time to kill greenwashing.