What is greenwashing and how to be aware of it while shopping?

It might be a new term for you but unfortunately, the meaning of this word is being exercised since people started talking loudly about environmental care. It’s a combination of two words; green plus whitewash. It means duping people for the sake of portraying oneself as green. It is a practice followed by most of those companies that are not environmentally friendly. They don’t meet environmental standards in their operations but trickily follow them as if they are following green laws. They follow in a way that they don’t have to lose any benefit for the sake of the environment and they just pretend to be following all their environmental standards. They show themselves as green companies the most caring and environmentally responsible entity. In short, they portray themselves as environmentally friendly in all their workings but they are not green or environmentally friendly.

Why companies do greenwashing?

The main purpose of most of the companies to do greenwashing is that they want to grab an environmentally conscious market by just showing themselves as green. Secondly, they want to satisfy their environmental regulator that they are following all green laws. In most of the developing and least developed countries, it is so easy to dupe their green regulator either by playing smart or by offering them any type of monetary or non-monetary under-the-table benefit. In advanced countries, though duping the green regulator is not that much easy but companies with the help of their environmental consultants follow the green laws so smartly that they do less but it seems they are doing great for green care. Every cosmetic activity they do fondly but where they can hide their violations or avoid the slap of law they don’t waste time to do it.

Another purpose of greenwashing by the companies is to win the favor of their donors and sponsors. Most of the financiers of big companies are from advanced countries and they want their financed company should not violate any type of law. So they put this restriction before signing the financing deal. Secondly, the franchised companies of developing and least developing countries just pretend to be environmentally friendly because that is part of their franchise contract to remain green in their operations.

Why be aware of greenwashing?

The general public must be aware of such companies that don’t take care of the environment and unabashedly claim to be environmentally friendly. Such companies do dual sin; first, they hit the environment and secondly they dupe the public. So what would be the ethical standards of such companies that hit nature and portray themselves as nature lovers? Can they take care of their customers? Will they be following other standards of quality while manufacturing their products? It may be but wherever they find any chance to compromise over quality without letting it know to their customers they must do this malpractice. So an environmentally cheat company should never be your trusted company.

How to identify greenwashing?

It is not so difficult. For this purpose:

• Before buying you should be familiar with the environmental certification mark of your country to know the product if it is green. 
• Secondly, almost all of us read newspapers and watch the news on TV so we should keep an eye on our concerned companies if they are violating any environmental law. 
• Besides we should also keep our ears open to word-of-mouth about such companies because public complaints against any company are also good criteria to examine the green credentials of a company.