Go Greener, Australia

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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.

Hmm. I think this is greenwashing. What do you reckon?

Mount Franklin bottled water is currently running a trio of ‘earth-conscious’ promotions. One is that you can win a Prius, and another is that you can win a trip to an eco-resort in the Daintree rainforest. The catch is that to enter, you have to buy a multi-pack (for the other two) of their bottled water. The third promotion is one where you sms them part of the bar-code of a bottle of their water, and they’ll plant a tree in your name.

I love my Prius, and I’d love to have a holiday at an eco-resort in the Daintree, but not if I have to buy such a stupidly wasteful product as a bottle of water to win. Landcare is doing the tree-planting. I’m all for planting trees, it’s usually a fantastic idea, but I don’t think one tree per bottle is a good trade-off for the environmental problems caused by bottled water.

A few facts about bottled water:

• It takes at least 3 litres of water, 80ml of oil and 75 grams of CO2 to produce a plastic bottle that will hold 1 litre of water (if I’ve done my maths correctly). That’s before you count the energy required to power the industrial plants that make the bottles, the oil required to transport the empty bottles to where they get filled, and then ship or drive them to the distribution plants, and then to the supermarkets.
• Mount Franklin claims to be more efficient (warning: pdf) in their production and packaging than other manufacturers, using only 1.3 litres of water per bottle, and keeping transportation minimal - they don’t mention the amount of oil used to make the plastic, though.
• Coca-Cola Amatil (the owner of Mount Franklin) paid just $181 dollars for a water-extraction licence which allows them to take 66 million litres of water from the Mangrove Mountain aquifer in NSW.
• Bottled water is more expensive than petrol - $1.57 per litre of Mount Franklin. Tap water only costs $1.20 per tonne in Melbourne and Sydney.
• In a taste test, most people can’t tell the difference between tap and bottled water; and in Australia, the health benefits aren’t all that much.
• Even though PET bottles are completely recyclable, only 35% of the bottles actually get recycled. The remaining 65% of bottles just end up in landfill, taking over 20 years to break down.

Besides, the SMS has to be sent to one of those promotional numbers that make the promoter a lot of money, similar to Australian Idol and other call-in competitions. If Coca-Cola Amatil has already committed to planting 250,000 trees, then why do they need us to send them text messages? I think this is an entirely cynical move on their part, an attempt to look like they care about the environment while making money from the fact that being green is sorta cool at the moment.

I won’t be entering any of these competitions, in spite of being tempted by the holiday But do you think this counts as greenwashing, since the product is pretty bad for the environment, or is it a genuine attempt to do something good?