Companies are falling over themselves to make ecofriendly promises, but so many of these are just empty gestures
Ben Webster, Times Online 4 Feb 10;
Here’s a trick question: one company claims that its green initiative is saving a thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide a year; another, selling a similar product, says it is saving a million tonnes. Which one should you buy from if you care about the environment? The answer is neither because both companies are probably guilty of greenwash.
Even if they are being honest about their savings, these numbers are not enough to indicate which is working harder to save the planet. Such grandiose green statements are meaningless unless you know a company’s total emissions and can work out the percentage saving.
Ideally, you also need to know the reduction in emissions per unit of production, because a big cut in total CO2 could simply be a sign of a failing company losing market share. Companies that just talk about tonnes of CO2 saved are either trying to mislead customers or else have failed to understand good environmental practice.
Green claims ought to be subject to common standards and expressed in a way that enables easy comparisons. Assessing the merits of an environmental commitment by a company should be as simple as reading the colour-coded efficiency label on a fridge or washing machine.
Even when companies do spell out the percentage reduction in emissions per product, they usually fail to make clear how much of their product range is covered by their commitment. Coca-Cola announced last year that it was reducing its reliance on petroleum-based plastic by introducing a bottle made partly from plant material. They are calling it the PlantBottle, even though only 15 to 30 per cent of the bottle is plant based.
To be fair to Coca-Cola, it stated this low percentage clearly in its press release. However, it failed to state the proportion of its drinks that would come in this partially renewable form of packaging. It said it would produce 2 billion PlantBottles by the end of 2010, which sounds impressive until you realise that Coca-Cola sells 580 billion drinks a year. Only 0.3 per cent of the company’s drinks will come in PlantBottles this year. They will, however, be consumed conspicuously: Coca-Cola is attempting to secure maximum publicity by sending the bottles to important events. They were launched in December at the Copenhagen climate change summit and will be heavily promoted this month at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
When I asked Coca-Cola why it had no plans for much wider distribution of the PlantBottle, it blamed sceptical consumers. Lisa Manley, the company’s director of sustainability communications, said: “There is a great deal of scepticism in some markets about green communications. We are working hard to make sure that the communications of the benefits of the bottle are done credibly.”
Obviously all good green ideas have to start somewhere and can only be rolled out after thorough testing. But once a company has garnered the positive headlines and taken the pictures for the glossy corporate social responsibility report, there may be little incentive to expand a green initiative, especially if it is more expensive than the traditional practice.
By the end of the year Whitbread, owner of Premier Inns, will have opened two “green hotels” with a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than standard hotels. Much of the emissions saving comes from ground-source heat pumps, which provide all the hot water, heat and cooling. Whitbread has found that the pumps, which cost £150,000 per hotel, pay for themselves in ten years through lower energy bills. It is “considering the possibility” of making them a standard item in new-build hotels.
The real test of Whitbread’s commitment to the environment will be whether it pledges to install heat pumps at all 580 Premier Inns. Presently, Whitbread’s green hotels are as limited as PlantBottles in terms of the proportion of the business they cover. Perhaps 0.3 per cent is some kind of magic number in green marketing circles.
Honest statements about the extent of green initiatives would help to overcome cynicism, but are not a guarantee against greenwash. Honda is very open about the tiny number of hydrogen fuel-cell cars it is making over the three years to June 2011: it will sell a total of 200 out of more than ten million cars over the period. Many will be given to celebrities; Jamie Lee Curtis has already received hers.
Honda knows that no one expects fuel-cell cars to be a common sight on the roads in the next couple of years. But it wants to persuade drivers and governments that the dream of zero-emission motoring really is achievable in the next two decades.
Yet according to Oliver Inderwildi, of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, fuel cells will not be widely available until after 2050 because of the high cost of the platinum they contain.
There is an enormous difference between doing just enough to forestall tighter regulation and taking the bold steps needed to protect the planet.
