For years, I’ve been preaching the gospel of green. Buy less, buy better, or don’t buy at all when you’re being sold a bushel of nonsense.
When I started my crusade, green was about as appealing as a bikini wax. But in the five short years since I began – and in the three years since my book, The Virtuous Consumer came out – green has become the new black. It’s cool. It’s hip. It’s…now.
Which, of course, means that much of it is…phony.
If there’s money to be made, the shysters will follow. Take, for example, the rush to provide bamboo clothes. Except for the fact that it’s not necessarily bamboo but rayon masquerading as it.
I hate greenwashing…and it’s rampant, says TerraChoice. In a 2008 study of greenwashing (making a product seem more eco-friendly than it really is), TerraChoice revealed that “of the 1,018 products examined, all but one made claims that are demonstrably false or that risk misleading intended audiences.
But for the past month or so – October being the official month of supporting breast cancer research – we’re being urged to buy “pink”. From lipstick to cars, t-shirts to toasters, companies have stocked the shelves with pink – promising us that a portion of the price we pay for our pink products will support various initiatives associated with breast cancer.
Which is all well and good, except. Except that we’re increasingly learning that many cancers, including breast cancer, can be linked to the products we use. Take lipstick, for example. Many lipsticks include ingredients that are known carcinogens, main among them are parabens, which mimic estrogen and which have been found in breast tumor samples. It seems disingenuous at best to sell me a potentially harmful lipstick, then donate a few cents from my purchase to support breast cancer charities. How about not exposing me unnecessarily to carcinogens in the first place?
I’m all for corporations sharing their profits with solid charities. But not when the products they’re selling are implicated in the problem itself.
Greenwashing? So last year. Pinkwashing is the new green.