What is Greenwashing?

Greenwashing is an attempt to cash in on the growing demand for more sustainable and environmentally conscious products. With claims of being ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘organic’, these keywords make consumers believe in their green claims. We can an example of a 'green' claim below in Fiji Water's advert. 

 

Fuji water's advert for being 'green'.

 

Green claims are how companies show how their products or services are less harmful to the environment. Many companies use these claims to market their products, through statements, symbols, logos, graphics, colours and names.


Although Greenwashing is a fairly recent household term, it was actually coined in the 1980's when oil company Chevron created a series of advertisements to convince the public that it was an environmentally friendly company, by showing how they are 'protecting' a variety of animals. This is a prime example of a company with a shady environmental background hiding with claims of being ‘green' (they were violating the clean air act, the clean water act and were spilling oil into wildlife refuges at the time of the adverts).

Below, is one of their adverts they ran 1985.


 

Many companies greenwash through their logos too, a well known example of this is the golden arches of the Mcdonald’s logo, they replaced their red background with a green one, making it seem healthier and greener than before. As we can see from the images below. 

 

Mcdonalds old red logo next to their new green logo.


CEO of sustainable home improvement retailer ‘Treehouse’ described Greenwashing as“The dark side of a very positive development”. We agree, companies do need to be more sustainable and being ‘green’ is the future but we want to see results that impact the earth, not just the pockets of large companies claiming to be green for profits (depicted in the image below).

 

Plants growing out of money.

 

Georganics are the real deal, we are sustainable, we have our accreditations and we are proud of them! We are cruelty-free and leaping bunny approved. We are soil association approved, with both the organic and natural COSMOS. We are vegan and vegetarian society approved (we don’t use silk for our floss). Our packaging is all recyclable, compostable and reusable and zero-waste with our Zero to Landfill scheme in which you can snap our toothbrush heads off and send them back to use to recycle with terracycle. We use all natural ingredients, which are all on our website for everyone to see. Lastly, (but no way least) we are a member of 1% for the planet, we donate 1% of our sales profits to causes we care about.

 

Georganics accreditations.