Sad but true: Not everything that claims to be green, or 100% pure, is so; let GreenwashingIndex.com help you sort it out.
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Companies have gone to great lengths to appear green, even if they aren't. Greenwashing is common, and it's not always easy for consumers to figure out if a product is truly eco-friendly. Enter the GreenwashingIndex.com, a website that helps consumers learn how to separate the truly green companies from the greenwashers.
A joint venture between EnviroMedia Social Marketing and the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication, the site's primary goal is to "educate consumers about how to 'read' an ad and encourage them to decide for themselves if what they're seeing is greenwashing." The hope is that an informed consumer base will force businesses to be truthful in their claims of sustainability, and to be accountable for sustainable practices.
Users can submit, comment on, and rate ads or business claims. The ratings are generated from responses to a series of questions about the wording and visuals in the ad, the use of vague or unprovable claims, exaggeration of greenness, and failure to disclose important information.
While some users are clearly informed, citing outside expert analysis or reputable statistics in their critique of an ad, others make generalizations not supported by facts, which is precisely the problem in many of the ads. It would be nice to see environmental experts employed by the project who comment on the greenwashing pitfalls of an ad within two or three weeks of an ad being posted. This would give users a chance to rate the ad without expert opinion, but then also provide an expert opinion on an ad that users can compare their critique to so that they can see where they correctly identified greenwashing and where they did not.
Despite this one failing, the website is a useful interactive tool for teaching consumers how to spot greenwashing--and that's a vital step in going green.
