As green consumers we're all engaged in a battle to stay one step ahead of the greenwash that's cropping up in new forms all the time.
The trickery used by marketing bods is getting subtler and cleverer by the day and it's therefore important to stay up to date with their techniques.This online guide from Futerra is worth reading even if you do consider yourself clued-up on greenwash, and only takes a few minutes to read. The 'ten signs of greenwash' list is particularly worth a look, if only to ensure you remember the basic warning signs next time you're out in the wilds of the high street.
Banana Republic is already in the doghouse as far as most self respecting ethical shoppers are concerned: pulled up on its factory working conditions when its London store opened last month, the chain is in dire need of a little greening.
But I'm not sure it's achieved that with its latest move: an 'organic' range, consisting of a mere 5% organic cotton.
Given that the Soil Association stipulates that a garment must contain at least 70% organic fibre to be labeled as 'made from organic materials', this is not only a poor attempt, but also blatent mislabling.
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Cadburys continues in its quest to redeem itself on the green front by bringing out a boxless 'eco egg' this easter.
Dispensing with the mounds of cardboard that usually encase its easter eggs, Cadbury will be selling Mini Eggs, Dairy Milk and Dairy Milk Caramel easter eggs in foil, with moulded plastic casing. Is that really any better for the company's carbon footprint? Mark Barthel, of packaging campaign and consultancy group Wrap, would agress, and said: "This is good news for both the consumer and the environment but also for Cadbury, as cutting waste also means cutting costs."
[Via the Guardian]
It's hardly going to stop the ice-caps melting, but if you're a big chocolate fan, this one claims to 'do good as well as taste good'. Let's have a look at why...
Terra Pass's Climate Change Chocolate bar is the only carbon offset confectionery I'm aware of, and each bar comes with a verified TerraPass offset of 133 pounds of carbon dioxide reduction. It also comes in a wrapper decorated with 15 tips for lightening your environmental impact.
Sounds er, great. But the chocolate isn't fairtrade and I'm not even sure the wrappers are recycled so score zero there. As for the messages on the packet, these sound about as likely to get through to young chocoholics as the 'save the animals' messages on those old Cadbury's Wildlife Bars, which were mostly just resented by kids for being so insubstantial. Green bandwagon ahoy!
Last week they wowed us with the 3110 Evolve and now Nokia is developing the theme with a concept eco-mobile. The manufacture would make use of environmentally friendly materials such as plant-based plastics and recycled steel. Additionally, there would be no traditional battery charing required; perhaps predictably, the Eco Sensor Project would make use of a solar panel, although it would be attached to a bracelet rather than to the phone itself.
This is because the bracelet would also provide other information, such as weather reports and indeed the health of the wearer through tracking vital signs. We can only assume it would also function as a watch, although the chances of anyone in this fashion-fickle world wearing the same bracelet daily (especially some men) seem pretty slim. Is this a truly green solution that might see the light one day?
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There are some products that simply don't need to be labeled 'organic', but it seems there are actually people stupid enough out there to spend money on organic water. Which has got to be up there with 'instant powdered water ('just add h20!') in the daft product stakes...
The bottles have been spotted in American branches of Safeway, and is undoubtedly much pricier than the (equally pointless) regular bottled water sold alongside it. No word on whether the containers are biodegradable or eco-friendly in any way, but the makers were probably right to assume that anyone misguided enough to buy the water in the first place would overlook that detail.
The water joins these organic cigarettes in a growing list of 'unnecessary organics' appearing on the market at the moment. I'd argue that while the health benefits are obviously moot, growing tobacco organically has got to be an improvement on using pesticides to grow cancer-causing crops!
Seen any bizarre or unnecessary organics lately? Let us know!
In today's Guardian, Lucy Aitken talks about the ethical shopper's worst nightmare: Greenwash. We're all aware that the claims to greenness made by many companies are at best, exaggerated, but how clued up are we really about being tricked into buying eco-friendly products that are anything but?
Firstly, if you've been taken in, don't panic. Marketing bods do everything in their power to make us believe the stuff they sell us is greener than freshly-cut grass, so you shouldn't be ashamed to admit it when you buy the latest bit of 'green gear' only to twig later that it came in yards of plastic packaging, or was transported halfway across the world to get into your eager hands. There is even an award for the worst examples of greenwash, whose 'winners' will be announced later this month.
So, if it's happened to you and you'd like to prevent future mishaps, we've prepared a brief guide to detecting greenwash before it hits you in the pocket. Follow the jump for the rest of the tips.
1. Watch out for over-use of jargon.
By and large, companies that make the most noise about helping the environment are the ones that are actually doing the least, and those that do make a difference will be honest about what they are doing and - crucially - what they're not. Two companies being very honest about their efforts at the moment are Eurostar and BSkyB.
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