Greenwashing: Fancy Words to Hide the Lies

Imagine yourself as a CEO for a large corporation. You receive criticism from every sector about the cabon footprint you cause, even your own kids are starting to ask questions. Eventually, you need to do something to silence the haters. But in all honesty, as much as us university students are anti-capitalist with every fibre of our being, it has to be acknowledged that decreasing a company’s carbon footprint to follow the direction activists are urging us to take is difficult work. More often than not, it boils down to a more eco-friendly production process costing too much money and too much effort. It is often pushed to the back of the shelf, only to be brought up again 6 months later by a different optimistic newbie. It’s a nightmare. So what do the corporations do to relieve the pressure? Fake it (greenwash it) till you make it baby. If the only item on the agenda is silencing people’s criticisms, this is the ticket. Ignore morality and just hire some word-savvy advertising people to manipulate the loyal customers into thinking your company intends to “go green”. Instead of the morally obvious, systematic step of putting funds and effort towards meaningfully altering an industry’s environmental impact, it’s far easier to hide the problem behind fancy words and cute personalised emails!

If the only item on the agenda is silencing people’s criticisms, this is the ticket. Ignore morality and just hire some word-savvy advertising people to manipulate the loyal customers into thinking your company intends to “go green”. Instead of the morally obvious, systematic step of putting funds and effort towards meaningfully altering an industry’s environmental impact, it’s far easier to hide the problem behind fancy words and cute personalised emails!

To give these advertising drones credit, the way they hide the truth of their inaction is quite clever. One of the earliest examples of this was seen in the mid-1980s when an oil company called Chevron released an advertising campaign called “People Do”. The ads feature Chevron employees protecting butterflies, turtles and other adorable animals. Butter wouldn't melt. They create a wonderful image of unity between their company and the environment. Furthermore, the use of the word “People” in their campaign title encourages us to include ourselves in their image of natural unity. It’s easier to swallow their lies if it makes the customer feel less guilty too, naturally.

The linguistic techniques employed by these corporations have gotten even more sophisticated and efficient since then, but they still rely on a few simple principles. We like words that make impossible problems seem solvable. Words that make us feel like we’re making a difference. And most importantly, words that make us feel like good people. We can bash Jeff Bezos as much as we want for taking the easy route, but we are equally culpable when we accept the neatly packaged lies that large corporations feed us. You may think that you are exempt from this, that you wouldn’t fall for such obvious corporate lies. I did too.

If you are confident in your eco-friendly perfect citizen status, then there’s no better (or more commercial) place to practice this than in the fast-fashion industry. They are experts on constantly working to minimise how much harm they cause to the environment and developing countries. It’s not just the blatant Primarks of the world advertising themselves as climate focused. It’s more subtle than that. For example, words like “eco-friendly” and “ethical” are thrown around the industry. Unfortunately, false advertising laws are not enough to fight this smokescreen of marketing. These trendy words have no legal definition, largely as a result of the lack of empirical data and state-funded research into fast-fashion’s impact. It’s easy to make a claim that these words apply to your newly rebranded company and make a show of donating 2p per t-shirt sold to climate-focused charities when there are no legal consequences nor quotas. It is completely false and completely legal: welcome to 2022. Despite more and more companies adding this flashy label to their catalogue and to our mobile phones, the fashion industry still produces an estimated 10% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. That is more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined.

But again, the “ethical” branded clothing is an expertly crafted lie in itself. We live in a hectic world with an incessantly stressful news cycle. When the average climate-oriented individual walks into a store, it is not unreasonable for them to believe a nice sounding tag instead from a ‘trustworthy’ brand and deem it their good deed for the day. It’s normal. It’s what consumerism should be like. The information on the real ethical crimes of the fast fashion industry are not accessible nor advertised to the every day individual.

Even if you are still immune to these perfectly worded lies wrapped in a little 75% off sale bow, most people are not. When we as consumers let this kind of greenwashing slide, corporations can continue to get away with inaction. Less and less energy is pumped into the climate-awareness campaign that we’ve worked so hard to maintain as tiny individuals. The pressure on politicians relaxes and our hypothetical CEO can sleep well at night with his million dollar bonus for “solving” climate change.

We must continue to fight against emission-caused damage by the fast-fashion industry and other large corporations. We cannot continue to let them use words to hide the truth and instead force them to show us the numbers to back up their lofty claims. It might be difficult work to argue in hostile environments and to appease money-hungry shareholders. But that does not mean we can afford to quit and take the easy way out. The fight will never stop.

Fuad Kehinde