Greenwashing

One of the greatest crimes of business right now is the practice of ‘greenwashing ‘. How many times have you been watching TV and ad comes on:

“we care about your children’s future and the future of our planet, which is why our product is greener than ever... brought to you by Clorox”

Makes you wonder, did they just raise the price and buy some carbon offsets? Seriously, I’ve seen CAR COMPANIES advertise their products as ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’... IT’S STILL A FREAKIN CAR. That’s like saying Paris Hilton is now ‘Chastity friendly’.

The thing that is most irksome is that the terms ‘green’, ‘environmentally friendly’, etc. are mostly undefined which means that nobody is launching a lawsuit against any corporationS for false and misleading advertising.

Technically a product is ‘now greener than ever’ if it’s now only 99.99% toxic, down from the entire 100%.I like to make a parallel between this trend in products to people losing weight. Generally anybody with half a brain knows that for most of the population you only need to eat somewhat healthy and get daily exercise. THAT’S IT. Yet the diet industry is a multibillion dollar industry supported by everyone trying to find an easy short cut.

Now to bring my theory around, anybody with half a brain knows that chemicals are harmful and end up in our water and air, that driving a car is bad, and most of the superfluous products and excessive packaging end up in our oceans and overflowing dumps. Yet because bleach is now ‘greener than ever!’ we can excuse ourselves from buying it and tons of other products.

Therefore I’m not even going to bother going into what choices are society should be making because I’m positive we already know however it’s too inconvenient to acknowledge it. Besides that air freshener has such a cute new label.

ps. If you would like some more examples of companies taking advantage of this new trend and basically lying to the public, check out: http://stopgreenwash.org/