Fiji "Greenwashed" Water
Posted by Max Dunn Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:06:00 GMT
Hah – I see that Fiji Water is being sued for greenwashing!
In the Sustainable Design class I took in October 2008 through Stanford Continuing Education, we studied greenwashing, which is to promote a company’s products as environmentally friendly when they are not.
TerraChoice provides a good greenwash metric with their Six Sins of Greenwashing:
- The Sin of Hidden Tradeoff – Promoting a single green factor of a product without any attention to other important issues.
- The Sin of No Proof – Unsubstantiated claims. For example, claiming a product was not tested on animals, but with no third party certification.
- Sin of Vagueness – Poorly defined or overly broad claims, such as “chemical free.”
- Sin of Irrelevance – A claim that may be true, but is either unimportant or otherwise irrelevant.
- Sin of Fibbing – Claims of certification that are false.
- Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils – A claim that may be true, but distracts from greater environmental impacts.
For my greenwashing analysis, I chose to write about Fiji Water. While Fiji Water does have a lot of sustainability programs in place, their business model of shipping water from Fiji in itself is not environmentally friendly at all!
So I was gratified today to see that others share my concern about Fiji Water and that they are actually being sued for greenwashing. The lawsuit claims that Fiji Water’s claim of being carbon negative is not true because they are using a discredited carbon accounting method known as “forward crediting.”
While I didn’t know about this when I wrote my paper, I feel justified to have identified Fiji Water as a greenwasher over 2 years ago!