This article was first released by Inside Climate News. It is being shared here as part of the climate-changing insights to motivate people.
Environmentalists have been calling out banks and consumer brands, like fashion brands ASOS and Barclays, for years for greenwashing, which is when they say things that aren’t true about their goods or practices.
“Greenhushing,” on the other hand, is a practice that seems odd in which companies don’t want the public to know about their eco-friendly actions and goals.
For instance, BlackRock has taken down several mentions on its website of its promise to help reach net zero emissions by 2050. However, the company’s CEO said that the company would still talk about climate problems with the companies it invests in, according to the Washington Post. Grist reports that consumer goods companies, like those that sell clothes, food and drinks, and other goods, are also joining the “greenhushing” trend, even though they are already taking steps to be more environmentally friendly.
At the same time, as the fight against climate change has stepped up over the past few years, so has the desire for goods and services that are good for the earth. What’s the deal with this contradiction? There are a few things that experts say could be going on.
In the past few years, liberal activists and groups have attacked businesses like H&M, Nike, Allbirds shoes, and Canada Goose for their widespread greenwashing efforts. Even though many of these companies won their lawsuits, they still got a lot of bad press. The Post says that lawmakers and thought leaders on the other side of the line are speaking out against “woke” environmental efforts and business decisions that are made with climate change in mind.
“If you’re a CEO with good intentions, you might get sued from both sides—from the left and from the right,” Renat Heuberger told the Post. Heuberger is the co-founder and CEO of South Pole, a climate company that put out a poll on greenwashing trends. “That’s not good news if you want to get more CEOs to do something about climate change.”
South Pole’s study says that because of this criticism, some companies have stopped talking about what they are doing to cut down on pollution or their environmental impact on the public.
Axios reports that Uber added a new tool on Monday that lets riders know how many emissions they could avoid by picking an electric or hybrid car. This is part of a growing market trend. For example, when I was looking for a flight on Skyscanner this week, the app told me which choices put out the least amount of CO2.
People are getting more and more of these tools, but do they use them when they make their final purchase? I asked Xavier Font, who works as a professor of green marketing at the University of Surrey and gives advice to Booking, Google, Expedia, and Skyscanner.
He told me over the phone, “Right now, no one—not even the companies themselves—has done a public study that says, ‘Does this have an effect or not?'” “The thing is, we’re not sure what they add.” They went to a lot of trouble to make a system, so I think we could do a better job of checking it.
In the same way, studies show that people’s actions can vary when they are given with “eco-friendly” goods. In a study done in 2022, 78% of people in the US said that living in a way that is good for the environment is important to them, and 30% said they would be more likely to buy something if it had ads for it that were good for the environment.
But some tests show that it can also work the other way around. For instance, in a 2020 study, more than 250 Americans were asked to rate two ads for laundry detergent: one with the words “sustainable” written on it and one without those words. Most of the people who took part thought that the more environmentally friendly product wasn’t as good, even though they hadn’t tried it.
Font says that marking goods as sustainable makes people a little more aware of too much information, and more suspicious of possible greenwashing.
Katherine White, a researcher in sustainable business at the University of British Columbia, and co-authors in the Harvard Business Review say that companies can use social influence to get people to buy with sustainability in mind, or they can focus on other good things about the product, like how safe it is or how innovative it is.
In general, greenhushing comes with some risks. Some experts say it can be harder to keep track of progress as banks and stores that sell things to consumers play down or get rid of their public promises to be more environmentally friendly.
Austin Whitman, CEO of Climate Neutral, a nonprofit that tracks climate pledges, told Grist, “We really, really, really need a lot more disclosure of all the environmental actions that companies are taking. We need it to be disclosed regularly and transparently, and we need it to be disclosed quantitatively.”
Source – Mother Jones
