What is greenwashing? Seven common forms

Greenwashing is presenting a product’s or organisation’s environmental performance as better than it is. The word suggests bad faith, but most cases are not deliberate falsehood; they are unsubstantiated, unmeasured or badly framed good intent. The distinction does not help — to a regulator or a consumer, both land in the same place.

Seven common forms

• Hidden trade-off — highlighting an improvement in one dimension while omitting the one that worsened, such as recycled packaging that is twice as heavy
• Unsubstantiated claim — saying ‘eco-friendly’ with no measurement or verification behind it
• Vagueness — undefined terms such as ‘green’, ‘clean’ or ‘natural’; any adjective whose meaning is left to the reader
• Irrelevant truth — technically accurate but meaningless, such as stressing the absence of a substance banned years ago
• Lesser of two evils — claiming relative superiority within an already high-impact category
• Fake label — a badge you designed yourself that resembles an official certification
• Scale shifting — presenting an improvement in one product as the whole company’s performance

The rules are tightening

ISO 14021 requires self-declared environmental claims to be verifiable, specific and non-misleading; blanket phrases such as ‘environmentally friendly’ are explicitly not accepted. On the EU side, the Green Claims Directive establishes a regime requiring environmental marketing claims to be substantiated in advance and independently verified.

Turkish advertising legislation likewise covers misleading environmental claims, and the Advertising Board can impose administrative sanctions on them. The risk is not only reputational.

How to make a claim defensible

• Be specific — not ‘low carbon’ but ‘320 kg CO₂e per tonne (A1-A3, EN 15804+A2)’
• State the comparison basis — lower than what: your previous product, or the sector average
• State the system boundary — do not present a cradle-to-gate figure as cradle-to-grave
• State the scope — one product, a product family, or the whole company
• Do not rest on a single indicator — if you cut carbon and raised water use, say both
• Get it verified — an independently verified EPD is the strongest defence available