What is unwitting greenwashing

To shed light on this question is Fabio Iraldo, lecturer at Università Bocconi in Milan and associate professor at the Institute of Management of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, who explains: "In recent years, companies have tended to make a genuine commitment to environmental improvement. That is why I am not worried about attempts at intentional greenwashing, or about trying to deceive consumers with false figures and statements, or with misleading slogans. That doesn't frighten me. What I fear is unwitting greenwashing — that is, the fact that a company becomes so captivated by an environmental improvement measure, by a modification to its product that can reduce its impact, something so alluring, so interesting — perhaps also because it represents a cost reduction — that it gets carried away and fails to properly assess the overall impacts that this modification has on the product. Everyone praises the circular economy, but we must be careful: in some cases, using recovered material involves treatment processes and logistics processes such that, in the end, the impact could be worse."

"That is what I fear," the professor continues, "that a company falls so in love with a measure that it fails to place it within an overall assessment of environmental impacts. The consumer, on the other hand, does not have the tools needed to tell the difference, because when they read a product label they will most likely find one or two pieces of information relating to specific environmental aspects."

Can you give us an example of unwitting greenwashing?
Many years ago, for instance, those who began using recovered material did not calculate at all the environmental impacts of the industrial processes required to make a certain secondary raw material workable, and in some cases these processes were more impactful than the depletion of the virgin resource that the secondary raw material was replacing would have been.

Consider, for example, bioplastics, whose total impact on nature is very different depending on whether the biomass from which they are produced comes from waste from agricultural production, or whether it is produced by diverting land and water away from food agriculture, possibly with the additional use of fertilisers. And if you then grow that biomass in Brazil and have to ship it all the way here… Another case is that of the CO2 footprint, where it is important to carefully assess all aspects.

So how do we get out of this? Is there a solution?
In my view, the revolution lies in a form of voluntary regulation. Labels should carry either summary measures of the overall environmental impact, or a set of indicators that consumers can read in an integrated way. That way I would avoid the risk of consumers being taken in by a change in packaging when the product itself may remain decidedly impactful. What I would like is a 360° assessment of all impact categories — for example, through an analysis of the environmental impact of the product's entire life cycle (life cycle assessment, LCA).

But won't it be too difficult to make this understood by the general public?
That is precisely the challenge: how do you use a complex measurement tool and at the same time make it easily understandable to consumers? That is the frontier. The European Commission is working on this with the environmental footprint methodology; however, in my view it will take a few more years to standardise consumer information in a way that is all-encompassing and credible, yet also easy to read.

But can voluntary regulation be credible?
Voluntary regulation should work as follows: if you want to communicate environmental claims, then you must comply with certain rules; otherwise you cannot make environmental claims. The enforcement of these rules could then be delegated either to public bodies, or — as happens today — to any complaints from competitors brought to the attention of the Advertising Standards Authority (which one may consider more or less soft-touch), or to the requirement that the company be "obliged" to seek third-party certification to have the data it wishes to communicate verified; so in my view the company should be required to pay an entity — which ideally should not be chosen by the company itself, but rather selected from among those registered on a recognised professional register.
In this last scenario, voluntary regulation could work, because it would not be compulsory for everyone, but only for those wishing to communicate environmental claims.