"Greenwashing" Advertising

You're watching TV. An ad comes on, one of the now ubiquitous "green ads" that promises something so eco-friendly that you're internal b.s. detector goes off. You momentarily consider Googling your way to the veracity of the claim when, boom, another green ad comes on, making another claim. They're everywhere.

If you want to "go green," both in the products you purchase and the companies you do business with, you're faced with a constant dilemma: who's telling the truth - maybe with, as Huckleberry Finn said, "some stretchers" - and who's just fudging it. With the Federal Trade Commission still revising its decade-old environmental advertising guidelines, we're on our own.

This misleading advertising practice now has its own name: Greenwashing. The term can apply to those who are flat lying about their claims (in January, the English banned a British Gas advert that made a false "zero-carbon" claim after viewers complained) and those that are over-implying a green connection (some evil advertising genius had me momentarily wondering if BMW was going to make wind-powered cars after seeing this impossibly seductive ad).

As we come to the point in the environmental movement where every purchase we make, and every company we do business with, has become a decision of our own environmental ethics, information is the key. There are a couple groups acting as watchdogs on this issue, but I'll point you to one in particular - the Greenwashing Index - as a good place to start.

A partnership between the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communications and a company called EnviroMedia Social Networking, the Greenwashing Inded explains how to spot bogus claims, and asks readers to rate an ad based on five criteria, which are combined into an overall score on its index. As we wait for the FTC to come to the rescue, it's a decent start.