I hate reading blogs or websites that provide categories that contain no information.  So here is a little post on the Mea Culpa category.

I hate it when newspapers, TV and radio news programs and just about every other news source makes a mistake and doesn’t make a correction easy to find (if they make a correction at all).  These mistakes can have huge impacts.  I decided to add this category when I accused someone of crying wolf about greenwash.  I figured that if I was going to make accussations that I better be willing and able to retract those accussations in an obvious way.  So I want to make sure that Greenwash makes it easy for you to find corrections to my mistakes.  That is what the Mea Culpa category is all about. 

Hopefully there won’t be too many posts here.  I am human though, so if you do find mistakes, let me know.

Taking Back Austin seems to see green washing in every action that the City of Austin is taking.  While it is always a good idea to double check the “good ideas” that our government offers us, I encourage people to be careful of overusing the term greenwash.  The source of TBA’s ire is Austin’s plans to implement single stream recycling (recycling seems like a good idea right?).  The problem for TBA is that Austin doesn’t have a single stream recycling plant, yet, and the recyclables need to be transported a distance of about 80 miles to San Antonio by truck.

There are all sorts of problems with TBA’s post, but the big one is the lack of rigor in analyzing the issues s/he is railing against.

I think TBA gives us a good example of how not to expose green washing. In fact, I think that s/he gives us a great example of diminishing the power of the term.  Remember that school yard retort — that’s my name don’t wear it out.  Well, inappropriately labeling something can wear out its value.  We are seeing that in the use of the words green, earth friendly, environmentally friendly, eco, etc.  That is why there is growing attention to the term greenwash.  Let’s not over use the term and make it as meaningless as organic or natural.

Oh yeah, TBA does provide an interesting example of using the term greenwash in as an anti-government regulation attack.  Kind of interesting.