How to Spot and Minimize Greenwashing
In the fourth part of our series with Andy Last, we talk about greenwashing and what businesses can do to minimize its effects.
Giles: I was going to ask you a little bit about greenwashing. Self-evidently, this is a challenge that we will face in the sector of sustainable future business.I’ve been writing about this stuff for 20 odd years now and the amount of stories I’ve done on greenwashing, I mean, they’re flooding out of my ears, really, unfortunately.So I don’t know what you might comment on about greenwashing in terms of how to spot it, how you can see when companies are acting unpurposefully, for one of the better words, and really how we can try and alleviate these issues and perhaps minimize what’s going on with greenwashing in the business world.
Andy Last: Yeah, I think you’re right. It’s been around for a long time. The phrase itself was back in the 80s, used to describe those signs in hotel rooms where it said, ‘please care for the environment by not washing your sheets or towels everyday’, but not mentioning that was going to save us as the hotel manager, an awful lot of money. So I think greenwash is about being open about things as well as not balancing what you do and what you say. And the danger of greenwashing now is that it is increasingly easy for businesses to be called out. Just the power of social media, the ability to share where a company is saying more than it’s doing is very easy now that is a high risk. The other interesting thing going on is whereas in the past it would just be the pressure groups, the Greenpeace, for example, calling a company out. There is now a direct correlation between the sort of questions an activist pressure group would put to a business and what its investors are now asking every quarter. They’re asking for that, and the sort of rankings produced by the investors are shared by the pressure groups. There’s a really interesting coming together I think of the investors and analysis and what the pressure groups are looking at. And that, I think, is why CSR and ESG are so high on the corporate agenda of people who dragged into this. And then when the sort of marketing department gets out of control and starts going ahead of where the business is, that that’s where the problem is. What I don’t think you have to do is wait until everything is perfect in your business before you market. I think being able to market where you are doing certain good things, you know, you’re on a journey, you know you’re not all the way there, you’re open about what isn’t there in the business, but, I don’t think a fear of greenwash should paralyze a business from communicating what it’s doing that’s good. It’s just to be open about where maybe the journey isn’t complete yet.
Giles: Yeah. Okay, great. I mean, everybody’s moving along the journey and pathway with these kinds of elements anyway.