#BCorpMonth: How can you avoid the greenwashing trap?

Greenwashing has ironically become a dirty word. The Oxford English dictionary defines it as; ‘The creation or propagation of an unfounded or misleading environmentalist image’.

Pretty sinister, given mounting evidence that our environment is in chaotic decline, that temperatures are soaring globally, that as many as 2,000 species a year face extinction, and air quality continues to fall with an alarming effect on public health.

But greenwashing isn’t always the product of malicious fabrication. Broadly speaking, the motives for making false claims fall into two categories. The first features those who wish to cover up an inconvenient (and often reckless) corporate truth – the Montgomery Burns of the world, knowingly overseeing systematic environmental catastrophe. The second includes the well-meaning organisations boosting their climate creds incrementally or selectively, but still misleadingly – the corporate version of telling your friends you’re vegan but still ordering pigs-in-blankets at the pub.

These are very different purposes, but they can result in the same outcome – a damaged planet and damaged trust.

Beyond this primary ethical issue with greenwashing as a practice, there is of course a secondary, and more pragmatic reason to avoid telling tall tales. It’s bad for business.

As part of our corporate communications function here at Lodestone, it’s our job to advise business leaders the world over on how to tell their organisation’s story: in other words, how best they can align their brand with the parts of the world that they consider their community. There are endless ways of connecting with your community and encouraging them to join your journey, but there is one obvious and painful way of undoing that hard work: lying to them.

We’ve all seen cherished brands called out for their misreporting of emissions, their poor-quality working conditions, their questionable supply chains, and their greenwashing. Not only are these people ignoring their ethical responsibility as business leaders; they’re also directly hurting the bottom line as boycotts and crises harm sales.

Of course, mistakes happen and reporting on your organisation’s environmental and social impact can become resource-intensive and confusing. But people aren’t fools: we’re all mostly able to spot the difference between deliberate lies and honest mistakes. The reaction from your community, supply chain, customers and peers when an accusation of greenwashing has been made will rapidly tell you where you stand.

So how can we make sure we don’t fall into the trap of the second group? How do we maintain agency in not supporting those who live in the first?