Greenbuilding or Greenwashing?
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 09.30.05
We picked up a sample of a product at a local homeshow- tiles to put on your basement floor to keep it warm and comfortable. We noticed a logo for "greenbuilding" and a note about it being recognized as a green product. Wondering how a sheet of formaldehyde-filled particle board glued to Styrofoam SM could be a green product, we asked the salesman, who said "it saves energy". We are sorry- if you think saving energy alone makes you green, we have a few over-insulated, underventilated, mouldy and toxic condos to sell to you. Sticking a label on your product where all of google cannot find the organization that called you green does not make you green; this is greenwashing plain and simple. We will not publish their name because their website and other literature have no mention of this, so perhaps they have had a change of heart. However we are interested in any other egregious examples of greenwashing that readers have seen. We will try to think of an appropriate prize for the best submission- perhaps a plaque made out of particleboard and styrofoam.
The Green Life published a Greenwashers top-10 list recently... but it's a lot of the biggies.. i am more into finding out the little creepy ones like you mention there ...Oh here's one, how about this groovy "Zen" alarm clock, it's got a new age way to wake you up, and made from mahogany ripped right out of a rainforest! Gaiam used to sell it, but kudos to them, they stopped selling them (well, they still sell zen clocks, just not the rainforest wood ones, not forest certified or reclaimed, just virgin non rainforest wood)
Evidence of a growing market interest as new designers/distributors try to get their chunk of the green consumer's money. Small scale for now, but we'll know there's a real problem when thoss ridiculous airline catalogs start featuring the bogus green goodies. As lame as such designs might be, it demonstrates the value of the TreeHugger filter: e.g.mainstream media are clueless about the rainforest wood dimension.
BoosterJuice claims that their styrofoam cups are environmentally friendly. They actually have a sign posted at one store here (Mackenzie King bridge entrance of Rideau Centre, Ottawa, Ontario), which even goes so far to state that "burning styrofoam produces no toxic emissions."