Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7 Environmental Claims and Reporting
ENVIRONMENTAL CLAIMS AND DECLARATIONS
Making environmental claims, or any claim, about a product or service is meant to attract more
customers to increase sales; but making claims comes with the added burden of higher scrutiny
from the public. In an era of rapid communication, news of exaggerated or hard-to-believe
claims can spread rapidly in the cyberspace, making them to fall quickly into the category of
“greenwash.” Greenwash is defined as “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environ-
mental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service” (“How to
create a truly successful corporate responsibility report,” 2006).
These days people are bombarded with the word
green
, the prefix
eco
-, the phrase
environ-
mentally friendly
, and all the imaginable combinations to imply environmental attributes of
products or services that are friendly to the environment. However, in many cases there are not
any real efforts to modify processes or products to reduce their environmental impacts. In
other cases, the efforts and actions taken are trivial when compared with the largest impact of
a particular product or company. A good example is a dry cleaner that claims to be a green
company because it recycles hangers and plastic bags but still uses petroleum-based perch-
loroethylene (PERC) (Deardorff, 2010). The benefit of recycling in this case is irrelevant
when compared with the negative effect of using PERC, which is questionable because of its
toxicity to humans and its participation in the production of photochemical smog when
released to the environment (Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 1994). Table 7.1 pre-
sents several types of environmental claims that fall into the greenwash category.
To avoid problems the best policy is to not make any claims unless good reasons dictate the
need for them. For instance, if the dry cleaner previously mentioned changed the process to
supercritical carbon dioxide as a cleaning solvent and installed solar panels to offset at least
some of its energy requirements, then it would seem wise to let customers know. Or in an
example close to food production, if a company sells agricultural products produced under
Fair Trade standards and the products are certified, then a claim seems appropriate.
When making environmental claims or declarations, there are four aspects that need to be
taken into account:
1. Being truthful,
2.
Avoiding overstatements, exaggerations, or embellishments,
3.
Having the capability to substantiate the claim if ever questioned,
4.
Complying with existing regulations.
