Courtesy of Greenpeace

As the specter of global warming looms, most of us want to do our part to turn back the tide of environmental destruction. As with everything, M. Taufiqurrahman finds, it’s still a case of buyer beware when making green choices.

It has become de rigueur for Jakartans in the know to look for “eco-friendly” labels on products and listen up as corporate talking heads speak of “sustainable development” and “green business”.

What they don’t know, however, could hurt them, or at least their belief in all those promises of environmentally friendly products and green business. It’s inevitable that as consumers demand more environmentally responsible choices, there are some businesses out there all too ready to exploit their guilt and make money off their fears.

It’s called greenwashing, the action by which companies mislead consumers on their environmental practices or their products’ eco credentials.

Many companies have a long track record of riding green consumer interest and staving off criticism with advertising campaigns, distracting unwanted attention with green PR, denying the impacts of their activities or products and working behind the scenes to sidestep environmental regulations.

The term greenwashing may be relatively new – coined by biologist Jay Westerveld in the mid-1980s to describe attempts by members of the hotel industry to pass themselves off as adopting green policies – but the practice has gone on since the early 1970s, when corporations had to deal with heightened public awareness of their operations.

While corporations in the developed world have graduated to carrying out substantial eco-friendly programs, many in the developing world spend substantial amounts of money to pad their thin green resumes through slick advertising and PR campaigns to hide environmentally harmful practices.

The campaign against greenwashing has apparently just begun in the developing world.

It’s no easy fight, especially in Indonesia, where consumers are mostly ignorant about the practice and the government lacks the political will to implement regulations.

Greenpeace recently staged a campaign in Riau to highlight alleged greenwashing by the Sinar Mas conglomerate, the country’s largest palm oil and pulp and paper producer.

In November last year, a Greenpeace activist chained himself to the anchor of a Rotterdam-bound tanker to prevent the ship from loading Sinar Mas palm oil.

“What we’re doing now is highlighting the problems that this company has caused: the huge amount of deforestation, CO2 emissions, social conflict and biodiversity loss that it’s responsible for,” contends Martin Baker, an activist for Greenpeace in Southeast Asia.

Greenpeace accuses the company of clearing large swaths of virgin and peat forests all over Indonesia, including in Kalimantan and Papua. Sinar Mas counters that it reforests as much as it fells, and that it has set up protected forests in some areas.

“This is when the green-wash comes in; this is a big misconception and the source of their greenwashing,” Baker says.

“They cut down the intact forests, they profit from the timber, they destroy the peat land, pollute the local environment … and in its place, they plant only acacia trees – which aren’t native – because they grow quickly.

“You do see trees, but there’s nothing on the forest floor. Sure, the acacia trees emit a little bit of oxygen and absorb CO2, but in the process of planting the acacia trees, there is a huge amount of CO2 emissions.”

Sinar Mas recently embarked on a new media campaign. A subsidiary, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP), in coordination with Cable News Network (CNN) International, launched several 50-second advertorials for North American, European and Australian audiences about its aspirations for sustainable paper making.

“Some people may attack these ads as greenwashing or insincere,” company spokeswoman Aida Greenbury says in a statement. “However, let there be no doubt; while APP wishes to be a world leader in the pulp and paper-making industry, we will do so in a responsible and sustainable manner.”

In another press statement, Greenbury insists APP abides by Indonesian government policies on the protection of high conservation-value forests.

“We share Greenpeace’s objectives,” she is quoted as saying. “In Riau, our pulpwood suppliers allocate around 18,000 hectares [close to the size of Greater London] purely for conservation purposes. Among these are the UNESCO Man and Biosphere Program-supported Giam Siak Biosphere Reserve, and a deep peat conservation forest in the Kampar Peninsula.”

Greenpeace challenges the content of the advertisements and the media statements.

“They can’t seriously tell you they’re interested in protecting the environment,” Baker says. “Other companies like Shell and BP may be, but not Sinar Mas.”

He adds environmental representatives can sit down with Shell and BP to discuss issues because they have gone through stages in their environmental awareness, including Shell’s infamous Brent Spar snafu (see box).

“They started off with greenwashing, but then they realized it didn’t mean anything, and now they’re getting serious,” he says.

But BP’s fiercest critics continue to accuse the company of engaging in green-washing. Fred Pearce, in the UK newspaper The Guardian, called the green campaign mere confection.

“Delve a little deeper and it turns out that BP’s alternative energy division includes not just wind and solar and biofuels, but also natural gas-fired power stations,” Pearce says.

He argues that natural gas may be less polluting than coal and oil, but at the end of the day it’s a fossil fuel filling the atmosphere with C02.

Courtesy of Greenpeace

BP rejects any notions of greenwashing, saying its green campaign predates those of others.

“We were among the first oil companies to recognize, more than 10 years ago, that it was time to take precautionary action to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases,” says BP spokesman David Nicholas.

In 2005, BP launched an alternative energy program aimed at developing new low-carbon businesses with the potential to grow in significance in the future, he adds.

The alternative energy program comprises four businesses: wind, solar, biofuels and carbon capture. BP has a major portfolio of wind projects in the United States, and has been in the solar business for more than 30 years. It has also invested in first-generation biofuels – ethanol from Brazilian sugarcane and UK wheat – and spent $500 million over 10 years on biofuel research at the University of California in Berkeley. BP also claims to be the leader in developing the world's first combined power and carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects, expected to be built in Abu Dhabi and California.

“We have already invested more than $3 billion in these businesses and expect to reach $4 billion by the end of this year,” Nicholas says. “This is only a fraction of BP’s total global expenditure, but for these young fast-growing industries it is a significant investment – we have invested more in these areas than our oil company peers.”

But major corporations’ efforts to conceal their environmentally harmful practices should not distract us from the fact that on a smaller scale, many companies’ green claims are nothing more than a ploy to lure us into buying their products.

The Indonesian Consumer Protection Foundation (YLKI) says many producers in the country have long committed a number of cardinal green-washing sins, which, as defined by Canadian-based consultancy TerraChoice, include the sins of vagueness, of no proof, of worshipping false labels and of irrelevance.

“Some of the products we’ve found in supermarkets in Jakarta, such as mosquito repellent, claim to contain no chlorofluorocarbons [CFC], which is irrelevant because there’s a government ban in place against CFC use,” says YLKI research department head Ilyani Andang, referring to the 2007 ban by the Industry Ministry.

But the sin of making irrelevant claims pales next to the action of simple outright lying, or what TerraChoice calls the sin of worshipping false labels.

Ilyani, also a member of a government-sanctioned team tasked with drawing up regulations on organic products, says her team has discovered products being sold at upscale Jakarta grocery stores that lay false claim to being organic.

“We found that the ‘organic’ rice sold at some upmarket grocery stores is grown in Karawang in West Java,” she says. “This is a scam, as we’re fully aware no farmer in the area practices organic farming.”

Taking advantage of the government’s lax oversight – and middle-class consumers’ heightened environmental awareness – these fraudsters go a step further by stamping the logos of the Agriculture Ministry and private surveyor PT Sucofindo on their product packaging to bolster their organic claims.

The tags also give the producers a pretext to jack up their prices – despite a government regulation outlawing the unauthorized use of the two institutions’ logos.

“The most worrying thing is that these upmarket retailers are so easily convinced into putting these products on their shelves,” Ilyani says. “They don’t have the resources to check the veracity of the claims. The retailers can only go by what’s printed on the label.”

So if the stores aren’t doing it, then consumers had better read the fine print – and do a double check – before buying a product in a bid to save the planet.


Consumers Count

Corporations in the West have learned that the consumer is too powerful to ignore, especially when it comes to environmental concerns.

Greenpeace Southeast Asia campaigner Martin Baker cites the example of Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, which experienced a consumer backlash to its plans to dump the 14,500-ton, 463-foot Brent Spar oil rig in the North Sea at the end of its shelf life in 1991.

It eventually became the first oil company to decommission one of its rigs, and the decision would earn it a reputation as one of the most environmentally sensitive natural resources company.

Shell appealed to science and rationality in the decision, something that many environmentalists played off as a mere ploy for the most financially advantageous and not the most environmentally responsible disposal option.

At the time, Baker was with Greenpeace Amsterdam, which spearheaded a campaign against the move, including having activists occupy the oil rig. It gained momentum when millions of consumers in Western Europe began steering clear of Shell stations in droves.

Shell suffered a heavy financial cost and damage to its reputation from the campaign; Brent Spar was eventually given temporary moorings in a Norwegian fjord before much of the facility was recycled for a port there in 1998.

Greenpeace itself did not emerge unscathed from the campaign. Commentator Jon Entine, in Shell, Greenpeace and Brent Spar, writes that Greenpeace’s reputation suffered from exaggerating the potential damage the oil rig would have on the environment.

Baker acknowledges that Shell, as well as BP, are putting serious money into environmental research.

“In the late 1990s and early 2000s, both put half a billion dollars each into solar panel research and other renewable energy.” + M. Taufiqurrahman

Seven Sins of Greenwashing

Green is the new black. It has now become trendy – and profitable – for companies to flaunt an environmentally conscious image. Some companies get serious about changing their environmentally harmful practices, but for some others going green is nothing more than a smokescreen, a cover-up to conceal their eco-unfriendly ways.

Canadian green marketing consultancy TerraChoice helps identify which companies are serious about going green and which are just tagging along for the ride. The latter can be recognized through one or more of the following infractions:

1. The Sin of the Hidden Tradeoff: One environmental issue is emphasized at the expense of other potentially more serious concerns.
2. The Sin of No Proof: Environmental assertions are not backed up by evidence or third-party certification.
3. The Sin of Vagueness: A marketing claim is so lacking in specifics as to be meaningless.
4. The (new) Sin of Worshipping False Labels. Marketers create a false suggestion or a certification-like image to mislead consumers into thinking that a product has undergone a legitimate green certification process.
5. The Sin of Irrelevance: An environmental issue unrelated to the product is emphasized. One example is the claim that a product is “CFC-free”, whereas most countries have long banned CFCs.
6. The Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils: An environmental claim makes consumers feel “green” about a product category that is itself lacking in environmental benefits.
7. The Sin of Fibbing: Environmental claims are outright false. One common example is products falsely claiming to be Energy Star-certified.