Fresh green links

Not many links this week: did I miss something interesting going on in the world of green? If so, leave a comment and let me know!

The Story of Bottled Water – Annie Leonard releases another one of her informative videos, this time about bottled water. Give it a look if you’re still buying the bottled stuff.

The Plastiki sets sail – a boat made of discarded plastic, travelling from California to Sydney to show the damage plastic does to our oceans.

Prime Carbon convicted of greenwash in carbon credits – and LG greenwashing their fridges too. At least they got caught. If you suspect a company is not telling the truth about their green credentials, make sure you report them for it.

Warmer waters bleaching the Lord Howe island reef – one of the southern-most reefs in the world, and yet it’s still too hot.

Are you registered to vote at your current address? How about your friends and family? There’s a bill in front of parliament that will cut off voter registration within 6 hours of an election being called. This is discriminatory against young people, renters, and people who have difficulty understanding electoral forms, and is designed to restrict the number of Australian citizens who participate in our democratic system. GetUp has a campaign against it if you’d like to sign up.

How to spot greenwashing

On Saturday I had a brief interview with Harvey Deegan on Perth’s 6PR radio station. We were chatting about greenwash, and I got a lot of interested reactions in my email and on Twitter about it, so I thought I’d post a little more about it here.

More and more people are going green these days, making changes in their lives. And more businesses are doing the same, in order to save money and their workers’ health as well as help the environment. But as always, there’s businesses out there who want to look like they’re doing the right thing without going to the effort of making changes to the way they work. And that’s what we call ‘greenwash’.

So how can we find the companies who are doing the right thing, while avoiding those who are just cashing in on our desire to live sustainably? Here’s some red flags to look out for:

1. Pretty packaging without any real information. You’ve seen them on the shelves: boxes and bottles with pictures of blue skies and green grass, or maybe made from that rough brown cardboard that looks recycled. But looking eco-friendly isn’t the same as being eco-friendly. A lot of the time these products are just the same as their brightly-coloured competitors, over-packaged and full of toxic chemicals.
2. Vague claims about the product being ‘natural’ or ‘green’. As I said to Harvey, arsenic is all-natural, but that doesn’t mean you’d want it inyour food, or your cleaning products! Natural and green are words anyone can use because they have no legal meaning, and aren’t enough to indicate that the product isn’t going to harm the environment.
3. Specific or very grand claims that have no proof. Maybe the product claims to be the most eco-friendly in Australia, or to be carbon-neutral. Says who? If there’s no more information than that, how can we be sure they’re telling the truth?

Luckily, there’s ways to check that you’re spending your hard-earned money on stuff that will actually be safe. And if you think about it, up until now you’ve been successfully working out the advertising claims made by lots of other businesses, so this is just taking what you already know and applying it to a new situation. Here’s some tips for picking the winners:

• Read the labels. Check the ingredients lists to see if they’re any different from competing products. If there’s a big claim made about how eco-friendly they are, there should be a note giving more information about this (like who gave them an eco-friendly award, or how they’ve gone carbon-neutral). It might be in small print, or it might be on their website. Don’t be shy about calling their customer support line if you’ve got questions! If they’re confident that they’re doing the right thing, they’ll say so and be happy to give you more information about it.
• Look for certification. All that label-reading can get boring, so you might like to let an independent organisation do the hard work instead. Choice Magazine has a list of environmental logos you can trust (plus a couple more specifically for eggs and meat).
• Trust your gut. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

If you do find anyone telling lies on their products, you can report them to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

Remeber: there are businesses out there who are making real changes to their work, and they deserve our support. When you find a product that’s good for the environment, make sure you tell your friends so they can use it too. Don’t let the shonky salespeople stop you from finding the gems!

Should you dump your Sigg bottle?

I’ve just read over at Treehugger.com about Sigg bottles having BPA in their old bottle liners, something they’ve been cagey about for a while. I’ve never been one to worry too much about chemicals in my food and food containers, but bisphenol-A is not nice and I can’t say that I’m keen on it.

Sigg has admitted that their bottle linings contain BPA, but the level is below 2 parts per billion, and they feel that this isn’t a risk for their customers. Tests showed that the BPA didn’t leach out into the water in the bottles. The 2PPB amount is also about 5 times less than the amounts in some competing brands, so that’s another thing to consider.

However, any bottle purchased after August 2008 will have a BPA-free lining. They have a section on their website that shows you the difference between the old and the new liners, so you can see which one you’ve got.

In the USA, company representatives have said that they’re happy for people to exchange their old bottle for one of the new types if you mail contact them for details. I’ve emailed Sigg Australia to see if they’ll be offering the same deal, but haven’t had a reply yet.

I’ve got the old liner – I bought my Sigg bottle in early 2008. I’m not sure if I’ll do the exchange or not, since the risk does appear to be quite low. But I’m pretty pissed off at the lack of transparancy in their public comments. It’s just greenwashing and I’d have expected better of them.

Laundry balls, put to the test

This weekend I borrowed one of those laundryballs to test out, they’re the ones you sometimes see advertised on tv in infomercials. They claim to get your clothes clean without the need for laundry powder, with one ball being reuseable for 3 years. This sounds great for environmentalists – no laundry powder means no phosphates in the water (making it safer for greywater use, or just as runoff into the system), no manufacturing and transport of laundry powder all over the country, and it’s not tested on animals.

So I chucked this plastic ball in with a load of my laundry, and a load of Dave’s laundry. Our clothes came out perfectly clean. We have office jobs that don’t require us to work up a sweat though, and cricket season is over so I didn’t have any sweaty, grass-stained clothes to test with. The manufacturer recommends that any stained clothes be treated with a pre-wash stain remover, since the laundry-ball is more effective with lightly used clothes.

The ball has ceramic beads inside it, which are meant to create negative ions in the water, and convert it to oxygen and hydroxide using the power of it’s far-infrared rays. This all sounded very science-fiction-y to me, so I looked it up. And that’s when I discovered that this product is a scam. The science claims aren’t exactly untrue, they’re just very misleading. For example:

• Negative ions weaken the surface adhesion to make the dirt separate from the clothes: the product does release negative ions, but in such small quantities as to make it doubtful it’s got any effect at all on your washing.
• Far-infrared rays break up the water and activate them to move faster: well, apparently all materials emit far-infrared rays. Your cutlery, your morning coffee, your mobile phone – all emitting far-infrared rays at about the same rate as a laundry-ball. If you wouldn’t chuck them in your washing machine, there’s no reason to put the laundryball in either.

There doesn’t seem to be anything special about the ceramic beads. I’ve got a ceramic baking tray, and if ceramic was such a powerful cleanser then I’d never have spent so long scrubbing to get the food off it!

No wonder they recommend that any stains be treated with a pre-wash stain remover – this product doesn’t actually do anything! My clothes got cleaner because I washed them in water (which is a pretty powerful solvent in it’s own right). Maybe there was some laundry powder residue left over from the last wash I did, to help it along.

So yes, a laundry ball can help the environment. By giving you a reason to leave out the laundry powder, your greywater will be safer, and you’ll have reduced the consumer demand for washing detergents. But you could get exactly the same result without spending over $50 on a laundry ball, and just using plain water.

There’s plenty of products like this out there, all with different brand-names and slightly different claims. But I won’t be wasting my money on any of them – they are greenwashed. I’ll be sticking to my low-phosphate, grey-water safe, laundry powder from now on.

If you’re interested in following-up on the science or other people’s tests of laundry balls, here’s a few places to get you started:

• Wikipedia’s entry on laundry balls
• Buy Organic’s test
• Bean Sprouts’ test
• Lighter Footsteps’ Greenwash Alert
• Choice Magazine’s 2006 Shonky Awards gives a Shonky to a similar product

Anti-greenwashing campaign by Choice Magazine

Thanks everyone for being patient while I sorted out my blog hosting. Sorry, subscribers: I think you got a test post that WordPress sends out automatically upon install. Anyway, on with the new content…

The other day Wilma from O2 mentioned that The Australian Consumers’ Association is starting a campaign against greenwashing in our supermarkets, and you can help by letting them know of any bad examples you’ve seen.

Choice Magazine, which is run by the ACA, checked the environmental claims made on 185 products found in supermarkets. They compared them to this list from TerraChoice about the different ways companies can try to make their products seem greener than they actually are. You can read their report here: Green claims on supermarket labels.

Luckily, only a small percentage of them actually lied on their products. However, many of them are making vague, unsupported claims that don’t amount to much more than a way to make us feel all warm and fuzzy when doing our shopping. They don’t break the rules, they just hope that we aren’t doing our homework. This leads to a perception that we’re doing a lot to help the environment, when maybe all we’re doing is lining the pockets of marketers. Meanwhile, companies going to a lot of trouble to do the right thing will get lost in a crowd of pretenders.

Choice is starting the Green Watch campaign to make the standard for ‘self-declared environmental claims’ applicable to all green claims instead of only being voluntary. They also want the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to get tough when enforcing the Trade Practices Act for green claims, and for the government to get their legislation up to date with the newer phrases being used (like sustainable or greywater-safe).

Right now they’re just gathering data – so take their Green Claims Survey to let them know of anything you’ve seen that you think is an example of greenwashing. You can also let them know if you’ve seen any eco-claims that you thought were actually useful and set a good example for other companies.