Greenwashing

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Greenwashing is a form of advertising or marketing that deceptively uses social and environmental PR in order to persuade the public that a company's products, goals, or policies are environmentally friendly. Companies that intentionally adopt greenwashing strategies often do so to distance themselves from their environmental lapses or those of their suppliers. While the term itself was coined in a 1986 essay about the hotel industry's "save the towel" movement, the practice has been traced back to the 1950's with the "keep America beautiful" campaign which puts the burden of reducing and recycling litter on the consumer and shifts the focus away from corporate responsibility.

“Their glitzy advertisements can no longer conceal their climate criminal behaviour – polluting the planet, raking in record profits, and sanitising their own image to continue the climate-wrecking cycle.” — former Green Party MP Caroline Lucas

Notable examples

• BP-post-Gulf oil spill advertisements

• Volkswagen - emissions scandal