Saab Plants Trees To Placate Australian Ad Board.

A year after Saab was accused of Greenwashing, Saab Australia’s parent company, GM Holden, has been successfully sued by Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for misleading buyers into believing their vehicles would be carbon-neutral during thier lifetimes, Autoblog reports.

The result of the suit, GM Holden (Saab Austrailia’s parent company)is planting 12,500 trees and retraining its staff in relation to making green claims.

Wonder if the training will be how to more effectively greenwash or about how to create meaningful initiatives?

When will we see the first big greenwashing suits here in the United States?

As I have been contemplating this blog I have wondered how to evaluate environmental claims. Terrachoice, which claims to be North Anerica’s premiere environmental marketing agency, offers an interesting framework for evaluating environmental claims – The Six Sins of Greenwashing.  They seem to have derived these “sins” from research at big box retailers and the environmental claims they saw on products there. 

The Six Sins are:

1. Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off
2. Sin of No Proof
3. Sin of Vagueness
4. Sin of Irrelevance
5. Sin of Fibbing
6. Sin of Lesser of Two Evils

For more details on the Six Sins Terrachoice offers a “green paper” on their study.

I will add these sins as tags for future use.  It will be interesting to see how competing systems or frameworks treat the same products and companies.

It seems that a lot of the information I am seeing on greenwash originates in Europe.  Do you think that the Europeans are ahead of us in experiencing greenwashing?

Welcome.  You can read a little more about me and the origins ofthis blog on the About page.  But since you are here, I will expand a little on my views on the Greening of Business. 

Eight years ago, 1999, my business school was trying to carve out an identity for itself.  The then Dean had the brilliant idea that we should become a leading E-business school.  I argued forcefully with him that it would be a short sighted decision.  My reasoning was that ecommerce and other internet related activities would soon become standard business practices.  Basing a long term strategy on a passing fad seemed like a bad idea.  Thankfully that Dean left and the school didn’t end up following the E-Business strategy.

You are probably asking what this has to do with green business.  Good question.  And the answer is everything.

Nine years from now green and sustainable business practices will be commonplace.  Sure, we won’t be living a completely carbon-neutral, ecologically sustainable lifestyle.  Businesses, however, will have internalized the marketplaces demand that they need to be good (or at least better) stewards of our planet.  And some of these companies will truly believe it and live it.  Others will be laggards and only greenwash their products and companies.

This revolution will not happen as easily as the Internet Revolution.  But it will happen.  And it will happen faster if there is an active debate on what it really means to be green and sustainable.  That means the need to call BS when we see greenwashing but also understanding where companies really are trying, supporting them in their baby steps while never letting them forget we expect them to run in the near future.

Enjoy the debate.