How large corporations rather ‘greenwash’ than go green

In 2019, Shell - one of the largest fossil fuel companies - released an ad campaign called 'The Great Travel Hack' featuring Kaley Cuoco and many other influencers where they promote different ways to sustainably travel through the United States.

In 2017, British American Tobacco Bangladesh (BATB) released an advertisement on YouTube where a BATB employee talked about their clean water initiative 'Probaho' and claimed that it changed the lives of hundreds of people in rural communities and protected them from Arsenic contamination.

On the surface, these promotional campaigns appear to be rather innocuous, heartwarming even.

But what these wonderful gestures mask are decades-long malpractices by these corporations that led to the ongoing climate crisis or the catastrophic ramifications of environmental pollution we observe today.

To be more precise, Shell is still one of the top 10 highest carbon emitters on Earth. Until 1998, Shell was a member of the Global Climate Coalition - a think tank that fought government climate action and still remains a member of prominent anti-climate action think tanks like the Business Roundtable.

British American Tobacco (BAT), on the other hand, is one of the largest plastic polluters in the world. On top of the health concerns regarding its products, BAT is also infamous for suing poor, least-developed and developing countries in Africa like Togo for simply wanting to put a warning sign on the packaging of their tobacco products.

And on top of that, many reports blame BAT Bangladesh for the destruction of arable lands as well as the mistreatment of tobacco farmers in Bangladesh.

That is to say, these corporations have been trumpeting their so-called messages of sustainable consumption, energy usage and whatnot while either maintaining the mainstay or doubling down on malpractices that most adversely affect our environment. This type of hypocritical practice by large corporations to sway the consumers and avoid responsibility is commonly known as 'greenwashing.'

The term 'greenwashing' was originally coined by the American environmentalist Jay Westerveld in the 1980s when he found out that hotels were simply pushing guests to 'save the towel' to save their laundry costs while trumpeting environmental sustainability.

In the modern-day, greenwashing refers to the misleading representation of products or services or a company as environmentally friendly to avoid responsibility or to entice the consumers to buy their product under false pretences.

Whether it is the 'natural,' 'green' or 'sustainable' label on your products or the British Petroleum changing its logo to a flower (!), greenwashing has become rather ubiquitous and vastly more sophisticated as climate change awareness gained momentum among consumers over the past few decades.

In fact, greenwashing has become so prominent that even COP26 was not free from it. In fact, the situation appears to be so bad that youth climate activist Greta Thunberg branded COP26 as a "Festival of Green-Washing."

Later on Tuesday (November 9),  former Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn also slammed the conference for allowing an "awful lot of greenwash" and "not enough action." And, there is some truth to these allegations.

According to a recent report published by Global Witness, if the fossil fuel lobby were considered as a country delegation at COP, it would be the largest with 503 delegates - two dozen more than the largest country delegation.

From the delegates to the corporate sponsorship, greenwashing has penetrated every aspect of the climate conference. For instance, one study found that the 11 sponsors of COP26 including companies like Unilever, SSE, ScottishPower, Microsoft etc. left a combined carbon footprint of 350 million tonnes in 2020, more than the entire United Kingdom.

But why do these companies engage in these practices?

Corporations generally adopt greenwashing since it is beneficial for them to appear sustainable. By doing so, they can manipulate the 'woke' consumer base into thinking they are living sustainably by consuming the so-called 'green' products even though that may often not be the case.

For instance, many products we use in our daily lives contain the marks 'produced sustainably,' 'green produce,' 'natural extract' etc. to make the products appear environmentally friendly. While such claims may be true in some cases, in many cases this is nothing but a ruse to catch your attention.

In other cases, by appearing as 'green,' companies can drive out any competition that is not considered to be produced sustainably even though they are either producing the goods more unethically or serving lower quality products than the firms in question.

Furthermore, tokenistic greenwashing practices often prove beneficial to avoid public scrutiny and responsibility. Corporations often use greenwashing as a forefront to shift the public's attention away from potentially unethical practices.

For example, Coca Cola Bangladesh has been sponsoring beach cleanup in the country, partnering with the International Coastal Cleanup, a rather disproportionate measure by a corporation dubbed as the largest plastic polluter on the planet. But they do it nonetheless because it always gets good press.

Quite understandably, these large corporations are often seen to launch so-called sustainable campaigns where they set some vague goals with ill-defined strategies and sell them to their customers as progress. In fact, many corporations often use greenwashing to garner support while undergoing litigation or being sued for their malpractices.

For instance, Coca Cola Bangladesh has launched their campaigns to assist sustainable development in Bangladesh. Coca Cola also partnered with WaterAid to launch 'climate resilient' sanitation facilities. Last September, they released a 'Sustainability Highlights Report' where they promoted their efforts to curb environmental pollution, manage waste etc.

Similarly, if you go to Nestle Bangladesh's website right now, you will get to see Nestle's commitment to clean water and sanitation as well as water-efficient factories to promote environmental sustainability. Unilever Bangladesh also joined hands with the UNDP to make Narayanganj plastic-free just this February.

While all of that is encouraging on the surface, all three (Nestle, Unilever and Coca Cola) consistently rank among the top four largest plastic polluters in the world.

Yet, no significant progress or systematic changes have been made to cut back on the production of plastic bottles, packets and other pollutants; or to develop an infrastructure to reuse or recycle them, except for the tokenistic gestures mentioned above.

At this point you may ask, how is this legal and why aren't the regulators stepping in to distinguish real 'green' products from the fake ones?

Developed economies such as countries from the European Union as well as the United States are introducing and implementing laws to regulate greenwashing to protect consumers.

For example, the Federal Trade Commission currently considers it illegal to falsify information regarding the environmental sustainability of products. However, even the developed economies do not possess the infrastructure required to monitor the supply chain and thereby the sustainable production of goods.

Sheikh Rafi Ahmed/ Journalist

It is, therefore, beyond a foregone conclusion that developing countries like Bangladesh do not have institutions strong enough to handle such litigations and often remain vulnerable to exploitation.

Then what should you do? Until the regulatory authorities rise to this task, it may be up to us, the consumers, to remain vigilant of the malpractices of these companies and hold them accountable in whatever scope we can.