OTTAWA – Nearly all "green" consumer products make one false, misleading or unproven environmental claim to attract eco-conscious shoppers, a new study has found.
The massive probe of 5,296 products by Ottawa-based environmental marketing firm TerraChoice found at least one misleading green claim on 95.6 per cent of the items.
The situation is even more dire for children’s products, with 100 per cent of toys and 99.2 per cent of baby products guilty of some form of "greenwashing" when they make environmental claims.
"We did not find a single ‘green’ toy that was free of greenwashing, and only six of 706 baby products were ‘sin-free,’" the report noted.
Greenwashing is the act of misleading consumers about the environmental practices of a company, or the environmental benefits of a product or service. And while the use of respected eco-labels helps prevent greenwashing, they don’t always eliminate it.
Of products certified by a recognized third-party process, just less than one-third are free of any greenwashing – compared to 4.4 per cent study-wide.
The study, released Tuesday, noted that while one product could make a number of accurate "green" claims, the existence of a misleading assertion would be considered greenwashing.
The use of fake labels was also found to be on the rise; When TerraChoice returned to the same stores this year, three in 10 items (30.9 per cent) carried a certification-like logo so consumers would think a third-party approved the product as green, up from 23.3 per cent last year.
"It has become almost comically easy to find mock-certification marks on the Internet. We bought one for $15 . . . and it says, ‘Certified green, environmentally conscious,’ but it’s just a $15 item we downloaded from a stock-photo website," TerraChoice president Scott McDougall said in an interview.
Even though the overall statistics are bad, McDougall said there is some good news.
The number of products with proven and accurate green claims has risen steadily since TerraChoice first started tracking the prevalence of greenwashing in 2007, when fewer than one per cent of the items had defendable eco-claims.
And products with a longer history of using green claims are more likely to use certifications that hold up to scrutiny, the survey found.
This includes office, cleaning and construction products where "green" is a more mature concept, "giving us confidence that companies actually improve with practice," said McDougall.
Toys and children’s products are newer to the game – and it shows, the report found.
The percentage of products making "BPA-free" claims increased by 577 per cent since last year, while those making "phthalate-free" claims increased by 2,250 per cent; two-thirds of all these claims were found on toys and baby products.
The problem, said McDougall, is most companies selling toys and baby products do not back up their claims with any proof; 89 per cent of all "greener" toys and baby products provided no substantiation.
"They strike us as egregious because they go to the health of infants and kids, and we don’t have any reason to be skeptical of the truth of those claims, but the fact that there is no proof offered strikes us as abusive of the trust that parents put in products when they choose products for their kids and babies," McDougall said.
"We think offering proof is an important threshold for all marketers, and in this day and age, it’s very easy. We don’t expect marketing to become boring with scientific detail, but we do expect that information to be made easily available on the web."
Ottawa mom Lisa Dixon seeks out plastic toys and other children’s products with BPA-free or phthalate-free labels – and thinks companies should "have to back it up somehow" if they want to market their items as free of the toxins.
But there are some claims she just doesn’t believe.
"I look and see where it’s made," Dixon said. "If it’s made in China, I don’t believe anything they say."
TerraChoice’s seven greenwashing categories or "sins"
Hidden Trade-Off: A company trumpets one environmental issue at the expense of potentially more serious concerns as part of a hidden a trade-off between environmental issues. For example, paper isn’t necessarily environmentally preferable just because it comes from a sustainably-harvested forest.
No Proof: A company makes an environmental assertion but does not back it up with evidence or third-party certification. For example, facial-tissue products claim various percentages of post-consumer recycled content, but do not provide any supporting details.
Vagueness: A company’s marketing claim is so vague that it’s meaningless. For example, a product can be "all-natural," but still contain arsenic, uranium, mercury or formaldehyde because they are all naturally occurring – and poisonous.
False Labels: A company uses a certification-like image or logo to mislead consumers into thinking that a product has been through a legitimate green-certification process. For example, packaging for a paper-towel product includes a logo that makes the bold claim that the product "fights global warming."
Irrelevance: A company emphasizes an environmental issue unrelated to the product. For example, a product states "CFC-free," even though chlorofluorocarbons are banned by law.
Lesser of Two Evils: A company uses an environmental claim to make consumers feel "green" about a product category that is itself lacking in environmental benefits, such as organic cigarettes.
Fibbing: A company makes an environmental claim that is outright false. One common example is products falsely claiming to be Energy Star qualified.
Source: TerraChoice
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