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Coined by environmentalist
Jay Westerveld in 1986, the
term `Greenwashing' refers to promoting a product or
service as environment-friendly or `green' when it is truly not so. The
term describes efforts "to create a pro-environmental image to sell
a product, policy or to restore their standing with the public
and decision makers and to portray themselves as
environmentally responsible in order to mask their misdeeds against
the environment."Further, the US-based watchdog group, Corp
Watch, defines greenwashing as "the phenomenon of socially
and environmentally destructive corporations, attempting
to preserve and expand their markets or power by posing as friends of
the environment."This definition brings to light the rising
vicious corporate behavior that aims at maximizing its profits
and popularity by misleading consumers regarding environmental
practices of the company or the environmental benefits of a
product or service.
In the last two decades of the preceding century,
corporate environmentalism gained ground and the need to portray
alignment of business interests with public concern to save the
Earth, heightened. Thus, in an effort to prove themselves
as environmentally responsible, corporations started to
whitewash their poor environmental record with green claims. The
pejorative term greenwash was thus coined to refer to a more specific form of
mind manipulation to depict "a way of presenting oneself
as environmentally friendly while continuing to deploy
destructive tactics in the
background."
In the business world, the movement to protect
the environment started to gain momentum in the mid to late
1960s. Green images began flooding the market and green marketing—
the term that includes a broad range of activities, including
product modification, changes to the production process,
packaging changes, as well as modifying advertising, gained ground. As
the environmental movement gained prominence, fueled particularly
by Bhopal, Chernobyl and Exxon disasters, green
advertisements became numerous and sophisticated. As pro
environment movement garnered more and more supporters across countries,
races and nationalities, multinational companies came to realize that
an increasing number of customers were inclined to buy `green'
products. Polls in the US conducted to ascertain the shifting
demand pattern suggested that for a reasonably large of consumers,
the company's environmental reputation affected the purchase
of goods and services offered by the company. Such polls
further suggested that consumers considered environmental
crimes more heinous than insider trading or price fixing. |
