14 Egregious Examples of Greenwashing That Would Give the Lorax a Stroke
Don’t worry everyone, the Saudi Arabian crown prince promises he’s going to make the desert into a jungle and solve pollution for good.
Good Work, Starbucks
Starbucks read the room in 2018 and launched an initiative to do away with plastic straws, and replace them with special lids that had built-in straws. Those new lids had more plastic than the original lid and straw combined.
Saudi Arabia Promises It Will Make Up for All That Oil
The obscenely oil-rich and very trustworthy country announced a plan in 2021 to turn a desert into a forest to get to carbon neutral by 2060. Planting some trees in a barren wasteland should do the trick.
Do ‘Chemtrail’ Freaks Know Anything About Actual Airline Industry Pollution?
The commercial airline industry is responsible for nearly a billion metric tons of CO2 emissions every year. But Airbus assures us they’re creating “a better environment inside and out” with a promise of some laughably small reduction in emissions.
The ‘Clear Skies Initiative’ Was Doublespeak, Surprising No One
In 2010, an environmental group studied the effects of Bush Jr.’s “Clear Skies Initiative” to supposedly shore up the 1963 Clean Air Act, and found that, sure enough, it had actually drastically weakened pollution protections.
McDonald’s Went Green in Europe
Perhaps intuiting that Americans wouldn’t give a damn, they tried this stunt in Europe — they placed their golden arches on a green background instead of a red one, to indicate support for the “preservation of natural resources.”
Poland Springs Gave Us Flimsier Bottles
Their “Eco-Shaped” bottle uses 30 percent less plastic, which doesn’t sound like a win for the consumer so much as it’s a cost-cutting measure for a company that uses 17 million barrels of oil every year to commoditize drinking water.
BP’s Lazy Rebrand
In 2000, British Petroleum told us that BP actually stands for “Beyond Petroleum” now. This included a whole cynical campaign in which they greened up their logo and built a gas station with some solar panels on it to bolster their claim of being the “greenest” oil company.
Huggies Removed Their Perfume for the Sake of Mother Earth
Their “Pure and Natural” line of diapers boasts organic cotton on the outside and the exact same harmful chemicals on the inside, just… stinkier.
Pampers Made Thinner Diapers for the Environment
Pampers’ Dry Max diapers contain less absorbent fluff so that, to hear them explain it, they’ll take up less room in landfills.
Anything Is a Hybrid Car These Days
When you think “hybrid car,” you imagine a perhaps imperfect compromise that nevertheless is moving in the direction of environmental sustainability. In reality, companies are claiming their products are hybrid if they have a parasitic secondary battery that’s charged by the primary combustion engine.
Volkswagen’s Sleeper Agent Trigger Phrase
In a cynical blunder that cost them $35 billion, VW installed “defeat devices” that would spring to life when a car was being tested for emissions. It would create the illusion that they had dramatically reduced emissions, when in fact they were farting out 40 times the legal rate of nitrogen oxide.
Comcast’s ‘Ecobill’
They’re not the first or only bill collector to encourage you to “go paperless,” but they laid it on thick, with their “PaperLESSisMORE” campaign that conveniently ignored their practice of sending out endless reams of marketing mailers.
‘WelFur’ Was Run by the Fur Industry
Products with the “WelFur” label were marketed as having been sourced from farms that don’t practice animal cruelty. But it’s actually just a meaningless propaganda label instituted by the European fur industry.
The Turkish Coal Operations Authority Will Save the Planet With Its Website
The organization’s homepage features a big “Energy Saving Mode” toggle at the top of the page that removes all color from the site.