4.21.2010

Happy birthday, Earth Day!


Tomorrow we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day (not to mention the one-year anniversary of my first blog post)!

Over the last year, does it seem like more and more companies are going green? Just yesterday, I found an advertisement for Kellogg's cereal with the tagline "A balanced breakfast. A cleaner planet" and says Kellogg's cereal boxes are 100 percent recyclable. Well, sustainable packaging is great, right! But are they just jumping on the bandwagon to get my business? Not according to their website, in which the company claims they are one of the largest users of recycled paperboard in the United States, and have been using it since its founding in 1906. So maybe it's a longstanding practice, and that's good, but am I just now hearing about it because it's the "popular" thing to do?

I want to talk about a term you might not know about, called "greenwashing." Greenwashing is basically an attempt by an organization to spin their product to make it appear more environmentally friendly than it actually is.

The Seven Sins of Greenwashing website says the average number of ‘green’ products per store almost doubled between 2007 and 2008, and green advertising almost tripled between 2006 and 2008.

So yank the wool off your eyes and check out the Greenwashing Index and see if any of your favorite products have been greenwashed!

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