Stay ahead of greenwashing 

David Willans, Sustainability Director at Bladonmore, looks at how communicators can keep their businesses and careers out of the clutches of greenwashing.

Whether you’re an asset manager, B2C or B2B marketeer, corporate communicator or an investor relations professional, making green claims is a growing part of the job. Done well, these claims make a business more desirable to shareholders, more attractive to new customers and talent and reduces the cost of capital. 

But it’s an area fraught with growing legal and reputational risk. Green claims regulations exist in Australia, Canada, China, EU, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, the US, UK, and more – all looking to prevent greenwashing. 

Changing expectations 

Sustainability is a fast-moving, complex space. It’s been around for a while so has built up a basket full of broad concepts – ideas and terms like ‘carbon neutral’, ‘more sustainable’ and ‘net zero’. But as the field evolves at pace and our knowledge and understanding grows, these concepts are starting to become outdated.  

When it comes to making claims about sustainability, regulators are increasingly pushing business to be specific and provide evidence. The claim behind Apple’s worldwide marketing campaign for its new carbon neutral watch is a prime example. Apple is using a 1990s tactic of buying carbon credits (certificates that claim a certain quantity of carbon emissions have been reduced, avoided or removed from the atmosphere through activities like planting trees) to balance out, or offset, the amount of carbon created by the manufacturing of the watch. Apple’s claim is currently being challenged by the EU. The watch itself isn’t designed and manufactured in ways that take the total carbon emitted to zero, so the EU are saying Apple cannot claim that the watch is carbon neutral.  

As the risks and opportunities from sustainability issues become more real, investors want to make sure their investments are truly gaining the advantages on offer while minimizing the risks. In April 2023, Legal & General Investment Management, the UK’s largest asset manager (£1.3 trn AUM), pressured ExxonMobil’s board because of “concerns around costs associated with the decommissioning of Exxon’s assets in the event of an accelerated energy transition.” In Japan, three Danish pension funds did the same to Toyota. Both cases are asking companies to get more specific and set out the financial consequences of their climate efforts.    

Beyond investors, consumers and employees don’t want to be part of harming the planet either, nor are they willing to trust in broad statements. So, how do you communicate the benefits of your actions and still avoid potentially expensive risks? Here are four principles that will keep you on the right side of investors, consumer and employee perceptions and regulations. 

Don’t cave to internal pressure  

I find it hard to believe that Apple didn’t have someone in its sustainability, marketing or legal teams that raised a flag on the carbon neutral marketing claim. Instead, I imagine internal politics and senior pressures were at play, so concerns went ignored. As communicators, we need to get to grips with the technicalities, gather the evidence and make sure claims are true before turning our attention to how to make the most of those claims. We need to go from being the biggest critic while the claim is being substantiated to the biggest champion once we’re sure the claim is real, regardless of internal pressures. 

Make your claims specific 

There’s a shift going on in the way sustainability is communicated. It’s getting more specific, as I’ve written about before. In the world of finance, Alex Edmans talks about rational sustainability. It’s the idea that companies have to get specific about the sustainability issues that have a material impact – proving it’s rational for a company to act on them.  

In the world of work there are still jobs with ‘sustainability’ in the title, but there’s a growing number with more specific job titles that features words like ‘climate’, ‘water’, ‘scope 3’ and ‘nature’ in the title, too. The same thing is happening in the world of communications. In early May 2024, the EU announced it was investigating 20 airlines for claims of ‘more sustainable’ fuel. They made these claims because they are using Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). You can see the logical leap – ‘the fuel is called sustainable, so that makes the flight more sustainable’. The problem is for something to be sustainable, properly, it has to do no harm in perpetuity. It is why in energy we talk about ‘renewable energy’ not ‘sustainable energy’ – the act of harnessing renewable resources has an impact after all. The airlines should probably have said ‘lower carbon’ or ‘less polluting’ flights instead.   

Speak simply 

Sustainability is complex. There’s lots of jargon because precision of language is key when communicating within a field. But it’s unhelpful and confusing when you’re taking your message out to the masses. Jay-Z infamously rapped about how ‘I dumb down my lyrics to double my dollars’. Technically he’s a world class rapper but most people don’t care about that level of cadence, precision and word play, they just want music they enjoy. Net zero, circularity and transition are all technical words and phrases that are creeping into general communications. We, as communicators, need to do the hard work of explaining them simply. Thankfully, things are changing as the world learns more. It wasn’t so long ago that carbon was more synonymous with high-end tennis rackets and sports cars (as in carbon fibre) than it was with climate change. 

Educate your communicators and decision makers 

This last point unites the previous three: Explain the technical in simple, specific terms to communicators and decision makers. Give them a new understanding that they can build into their decision making. If the CEO of your international service business is talking to red state stakeholders while your latest ad campaign or tranche of media coverage talks about diversity, make sure the boss can tell the story about why DEI matters to you. Your answer may vary, depending on the data you have, but it’s likely to be along the lines of ‘DEI supports our performance and the communities we operate in. Our customer base is diverse, and we know customer satisfaction increases when they’re served by people like them. Do you want to see the data?’  

The above are broad principles. The legislation contains all sorts of nuances depending on where it’s from and what it’s for but when you apply the principles consistently, dealing with the specific detail will be much easier.  

If you’d like help with your sustainability communications, get in touch.