Wallet Mouth

Does greenwashing report paint with too wide a brush?

Say you consider yourself a conscious consumer (and I suspect that many readers do). When given a choice between a traditional product and its greener counterpart, you buy the latter. Now, what if it turned out that you'd been misled about the sustainability of all but a few of your purchases?

That's pretty much the conclusion of "The Seven Sins of Greenwashing," published by Canadian firm TerraChoice: 98 percent of so-called natural or environmentally friendly products sold in the U.S. make false or misleading claims. The report garnered lots of headlines echoing its indignation when it came out earlier this year, and another wave of media attention came earlier this month in the wake of a congressional hearing on defining fair green-marketing practices (TerraChoice vice president M. Scot Case was among the witnesses who testified).

I think it's helpful, however, to think about the difference between marketing hype and out-and-out deceit. The greenwashing "sins" enumerated by TerraChoice's report include not only lies (like the supposedly Energy Star-approved refrigerator Case himself bought that wasn't) and the use of fictional third-party certification logos—in other words, deliberate disinformation—but also things like vagueness (claims that are "poorly defined or broad") and irrelevance (like proclaiming a product is "CFC-free" despite the fact that CFCs are banned by law).

I'm not so sure that those last two examples amount to greenwashing so much as they amount to greenhyping (if I may coin the term). I go back and forth on this, but recently I've begun to lean toward a stricter definition of "greenwash," in part because of sustainable-business guru Joel Makower's thoughts on the subject.

The way I figure, all kinds of products make all kinds of exaggerated claims. For example, this post in comedian Jennifer Dziura's blog points to a shampoo that says it gives hair a "mirror-like shine." If that were even possible, she writes, mightn't the product's maker incur some criminal liability for making looking at people's hair "equivalent to staring directly at the sun"?

Such hyperbole in traditional products is unfortunate, but the fact is, we're so used to it that most of us don't even give it a second thought. There's no reason we can't apply the same skepticism to products in the green marketplace. In fact, in many cases we  already do. I'm reminded of this bag (at left) that I got at some grocery store or other. Not only did I laugh at the contention that the piece of brown paper in my hand could "save our planet" but I also knew perfectly well that the environment would have been better served if I'd remembered to bring a reusable sack from home. Greenwashing? Meh. Greenhyping? Definitely.

It's worth reading Makower's take on the "Seven Sins" report. He points out that it's hard to know what percentage of sins in the 2,000-plus products examined by TerraChoice are what he'd consider justified criticisms and what amount to "nit-picking" on the part of the authors, because the report is guilty of the same lack of transparency it complains about in some of the products it analyzed. "There are no products named, no sinners shamed," Makower writes. (To which I say: That's probably because TerraChoice is an environmental marketing company. Since it makes money by helping companies become greener, it wouldn't necessarily be in its interests to name names.)

I'm not trying to completely diss "The Seven Sins of Greenwashing"—in fact, I find its categorization of the different ways green marketing can go astray quite useful—I'm just saying its big takeaway comes across as a bit sensationalist. If every instance of greenhyping gets lumped into the "greenwashing" category, that has the effect of drowning out the true crimes.

Death and taxes

Uh-oh, I just realized I'm falling behind on my goal of posting at least once a month. So here, pretend it's a week and a half ago, and allow me to link to a piece I wrote last year for Alonovo, back when they had a paid-blogging gig. Pardon the eye-taxing white text on black background...

Amuse-bouche: Cadbury goes fair trade

... But only in Britain and Ireland. Still, progress is progress! [Link]

Amuse-bouche: How kosher is Kosher?

Yesterday's All Things Considered included this interesting piece on efforts to expand the Kosher certification to encompass ethics such as treatment of workers and animals.

G, thanks!

Here's another case of a company changing a less-than-perfect behavior on its own just as I was starting to get a bee in my bonnet about it: We've been happily using gDiapers, which I've blogged about before, for six months now, but the other week, I noticed that the plastic packaging used for the product's flushable inserts had some misleading text on it. It said, "This Bag Is 100% Recyclable."

Um, no it's not.

Even in San Francisco's single-stream recycling system, plastic bags and films are a big no-no. And while some grocery stores accept plastic bags for recycling, the all-encompassing language in the gDiapers text was probably causing well-meaning but clueless parents to throw the bags into their curbside bins and gum up the machinery.

So I wrote gDiapers and asked what was going on. I pointed out that (as I blogged about in a recent post) the FTC's "Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims" consider calling plastic garbage bags recyclable to be a deceptive claim.

I got a nice reply from gDiapers acknowledging that yes, #4 plastic are tricky and are generally not intended for curbside programs. The statement also explained that the company knows plastic bags are not ideal from an environmental standpoint and is actively searching for a cost-effective compostable alternative that can stand up to the elements.

Meanwhile, the copy on the packaging changed! (I don't claim to take any credit for it, but what a coincidence!) It now reads, "For a happy planet, please recycle in communities where available." Much better.

The thin green line, part 1

Most people are familiar with the concept of organic food. We may be vague on the details, but we know in a general way that for a higher price, we can buy an assurance that pesticides and other chemicals that could harm us or the environment were not used in its production. Every time we pay that premium, we vote with our wallets. 

But the effects of that choice are not as simple as supporting the producers we buy from. Our votes are also changing the marketplace. The extra money consumers are willing to spend on organic products has created a "green rush" that goes beyond food. As you have no doubt noticed, the word "organic" is popping up in other product categories as well. Perhaps you've bought an organic cotton shirt, for example, or organic shampoo. 

But hold on. I would like to pause here to ask you to think about something. 

What, exactly, does it mean to you for a shampoo to be organic? Can you think of things that you would expect to be in it—or, more important, not to be in it? 

Until as recently as 2005, the use of the word "organic" in the U.S. personal-care product area was meaningless, since no one regulated it at all. Today, no less than three certification standards are positioning themselves in the sector, each with a different set of rules and a different appeal to authority. 

This is the first in a series of posts relaying what I've been able to learn about this corner of the organic standards landscape. 

As I mentioned in a recent post, starting in 2005, personal-care products were allowed to be certified to the USDA's National Organic Program. In March, another organic certification was announced, and there's a bit of a controversy swirling around it. 

The label is called OASIS (for Organic and Sustainable Industry Standards), and it was launched by a trade association of the same name that includes big industry players such as Estee Lauder, Hain Celestial, and L'Oreal, as well as a number of smaller brands. 

The new certification is based on two principles, according to its standards (downloadable on the website): "to promote the increased use of organic raw materials to make the ingredient building blocks of Health and Beauty Products" and "to exclude chemistry that results in non-sustainable products wherever possible." In order to bear the OASIS "Organic" seal, products must contain at least 85 percent organically produced agricultural material, excluding water and salt. That percentage is slated to rise to 90 in 2010 and to 95 in 2012. 

As I mentioned in my post, OASIS is named in a lawsuit filed on April 28 by Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps, which contends that the certification constitutes false advertising, since it allows for cleansing agents made from nonorganic ingredients that have been hydrogenated and/or sulfated and preserved with synthetic petrochemicals. (Disclosure: I have met and socialized with Dr. Bronner's president David Bronner and vice president Mike Bronner.) 

"The whole deal with organic is getting away from 'better living through chemistry,'" David Bronner told me. Companies that hydrogenate but want to call their products organic should "figure out some other way to extend shelf life. There are other ways. You look at your concentrations, your pH, the synergies between ingredients, your packaging. You have to think outside the box." His company's soaps, he pointed out, are self-preserving because of their concentrations. 

Bronner is the first to admit that soap, by its very nature, involves a chemical reaction (albeit an ancient one) and can therefore never hope to have an organic percentage higher than the low 80s. That's why his soaps are USDA certified only to the "Made with organic [ingredients]" level, which requires at least 70 percent organic material, rather than to the full-on "Organic" level, which requires 95 percent. However, other Dr. Bronner's products—lotions, balms, etc.—do achieve the 95 percent threshold. Bronner believes that OASIS's more permissive standard misleads consumers and waters down the meaning of the word "organic." 

Of course, that's not how OASIS sees it. For starters, OASIS co-chair Gay Timmons told me, the USDA's National Organic Program certification was designed for food, not personal-care products. When it comes to the stuff that we put in our hair and rub onto our bodies, "most people want an effect. They want personal-care products to function a certain way," she said. The implication being that such functionality is incompatible with the standards of the NOP—which, she said, "knows about farmers and livestock. Nobody there knows diddly about cosmetic chemistry." 

Again that word: chemistry. Central to OASIS's philosophy is the idea that there is good chemistry and bad chemistry, Timmons told me, referring to the "green-chemistry" principles outlined by Paul Anastas and John Warner in their book Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice. "Every process we use has to be something that doesn't cause environmental degradation," she said. "If it's safe for the environment, it's safe for consumers." 

But is it organic? 

To be continued...

Since when did “organic” mean “contains toxic chemical”?

Last Friday was a bad day for the natural-products industry. At the sector’s ExpoWest trade show, it was announced that a new study found a number of supposedly “natural” and “organic” body-care and cleaning products contain a nasty chemical called 1,4-dioxane (which the EPA classifies as a “probable human carcinogen”) that you won’t see on the ingredients list. (You can read the L.A. Times’ coverage of it here.)

Giovanni Organic Cosmetics, Jason (whose slogan is “Pure, Natural & Organic”), Kiss My Face, Nature’s Gate, and Seventh Generation were among the leading brands called out in the study, which was commissioned by the Organic Consumers Association.

To Seventh Generation’s credit, it has said that it intends to “completely eliminate 1,4-dioxane from all of our products.”

A couple months ago I blogged about learning that a lotion I’ve used for years contains toxins. But that was a conventional product. Wouldn’t you think that skin softeners with the words “natural” and “organic” would tend to be clean? Look at the study’s product list (pdf) and see for yourself.

Some people will probably say, Sure, this chemical isn’t ideal, but we’re talking parts per million here—how bad can that be? But as Adam Eidinger of the Organic Consumer Association pointed out to me, the EPA’s standard for safe drinking water is 3 parts per billion. “Granted, you’re not drinking these things, but you are putting them down the drain and introducing it into the environment,” he said. Not to mention absorbing their ingredients through your skin (pdf).

Here are some tips from the OCA on how to avoid 1,4-dioxane.

Stimulate the FDA on caffeine

Did you catch that recent story about how the smell of chocolate chip cookies prompts expensive splurging in women?

It turns out there are more arrows in the quiver. Another apparent consumption magnet is caffeine, and in this case the target is not only women.

The March issue of Nutrition Action Healthletter quotes Johns Hopkins caffeine expert Roland Griffiths as saying that the presence of the substance in a food and beverage “increases the probability that the product will be bought and consumed” and “builds customer loyalty.”

In recent years, caffeine has been added to comestibles with abandon—nowadays it can be found in candy, chips, hot cereal, and even beer—but it wasn't always that way. As the article points out, the Food and Drug Administration used to limit the amount of caffeine that could be added to any edible item to 48 milligrams per eight ounces. But for some reason, when Red Bull—with its 80mg per eight ounces—came to the States in 1997, the FDA didn’t raise the issue. That opened the floodgates to today’s overstimulated food shelves.

All of which is fine except for the fact that, as the story states, unlike other food additives, caffeine is “a pharmacological agent,” a drug that leads to physical dependence among regular users. The American Dietetic Association advises people not to consume more than 300mg of caffeine per day.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which publishes Nutrition Action, petitioned the FDA in 1997 to require labels on foods to which caffeine has been added listing how much of the stimulant is in each serving. In January, the article states, the agency “said that the petition 'is still active and pending and the Agency has not reached any decision yet.’”

If you’d like to encourage the FDA to require labels on jittery foods, write the agency:

FDA Dockets Management (HFA-305)—Docket No. 97P-0329
5630 Fishers Lane, Room 1061
Rockville, MD 20852

U.K. retailer bans child-labor cotton, tracks CO2

In another rendition of “Look how much farther ahead of us the U.K. is,” Tesco, the world’s third-largest retailer, will no longer sell items containing cotton from Uzbekistan. The reason? Forced child labor. According to this article from the Environmental Justice Foundation, tens of thousands of Uzbek children are withdrawn from school to pick the cotton that funds President Karimov’s government.

Tesco is also starting to track the carbon footprint of 30 of its private-label products, using a draft standard developed by the Carbon Trust, in an effort to provide labels that will better inform consumers about the CO2 outputs of different items.

Ah, England...

Valentine’s Day preparedness, Part 3: condoms with a conscience

Rubber can be a pretty dirty industry. I recently learned that Bridgestone Firestone’s tires come to us thanks to alleged labor exploitation on rubber plantations in Liberia (more info can be found here, here, and here).

I don’t know if most condom brands are made from unethically harvested rubber—that’s a research project for another day—but French Letter’s offerings seem particularly socially responsible: they carry the Fair Deal Trading logo (similar to fair trade) and are made from rubber certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

So when Cupid’s arrow strikes this Valentine’s Day, amorous ethical consumers can make their love spread far and wide.