‘Climate-controlled’ sausage! ‘Sustainable’ air tickets! But now greenwashers are being soaked
In 1986, an environmentalist named Jay Westerveld coined the term “greenwashing.” He was claiming that the hotel industry falsely promoted the reuse of towels as part of an environmental strategy when it was mostly a cost-saving measure.
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Since then, especially as awareness about climate change and the measures taken to combat it has grown, so has use of the moniker. And out of that has come much more attention to what companies are often doing to falsely cloak themselves in the cloth of being clean and green as consumers increase their demand for environmentally friendly products.
And now comes the third phase: Litigation against companies in many countries for their deceptive ways, something detailed in a study by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
As The New York Times reports, there’s the case of the “climate-controlled” sausage. And the all-new pants labeled as “recycled.” And “sustainable” air tickets.
As the authors of the research, Dr Joana Setzer and Kate Higham, say: “[T]he last few years have seen an explosion of ‘climate-washing’ cases filed before both courts and administrative bodies such as consumer protection agencies.”
The biggest number of cases? You guessed it — the U.S. has the highest amount of documented litigation, with 1,590 in total from 2015 to 2022. Next is Australia, with 130, and then the U.K., with 103 cases filed before the Court of Justice of the European Union. And between 2020 and 2022, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the number of cases challenging the “truthfulness of corporate climate commitments” more than doubled, the researchers say.
So back to that sausage. In Denmark, a national court in March told Danish Crown, the country’s biggest pork producer, that its “climate-controlled” pork description was a no-no (though it did say that it’s fine to assert that Danish pigs “are more climate friendly than you think”).
And also last month, a Dutch court prohibited national carrier KLM from using the slogan “fly responsibly” in its advertisements. Meanwhile in the U.S., the world’s largest meat producer, Brazil’s JBS, has been sued by New York Attorney General Letitia James for making “sweeping representations” about efforts to neutralize its emissions while offering “no viable plan.”
All, of course, meaning more work for lawyers. Let’s hope they recycle all those papers they wave in court.
