Green washing is essentially a company giving their product a false sense of environmental ‘friendliness.’ It is misleading the public by stressing the environmental credentials and impact of a product or company when they are actually irrelevant and often untruthful.
In most cases, there is an easy way to spot green washing as you look at an advertisement, and these are as follows;
Words and phrases which are not clear as to what the meaning is and green imagery that indicate unjustified and unrealistic green impact e.g. flowers blooming from exhaust pipes and birds being born and flying out of a nuclear power station. As well as these, the company may make irrelevant claims by emphasising and focusing on one small green statistic when everything else is un-environmentally friendly. They will often use information and facts that only a scientist in the division of expertise would understand, or indeed check, and some of this total out-right lies.
Although this car doesn't downright claim that the car is environmentally friendly but this is percieved by the viewer in the car matching the colours of the hillside as if it is at one with the country and is economocially balanced with it. It may not be verbally greenwashing people but the visual speaks for itself.
In this Honda advert is an obvious use of green washing with the car engine floating around a fairytale meadow. It's not shown in this particular image as I was unable to atain one but it claims that this engine is 'environmentally friendly' and 'loves the environment' which is a reckless lie.
10th January 2011
Jamarch
