What is bluewashing? How can we recognize it?
The term greenwashing is part of our daily life. But what is…
The term greenwashing is now part of our daily lives, but what is happening to the ocean? Do we really know what greenwashing is? What about bluewashing? And are we able to recognize them and stay away?
We hear a lot about greenwashing, literally “cleansing one’s conscience by doing something green”. This Anglo-Saxon term defines the so-called “ecology or environmentalism of facade“.
The term greenwashing comes from the figurative expression whitewashing, commonly used to indicate an attempt to hide the truth to protect or improve the reputation of organizations, companies, products.
So, what is bluewashing?
Bluewashing is the same as greenwashing, but it affects all the “blue” parts of the planet and the organisms that inhabit them: oceans, seas, rivers, lakes.
An increasingly warm and acidic ocean, loss of biodiversity and consequently more extreme weather events such as droughts, fires, floods and hurricanes, are the first signs of the advancement of the climate crisis. We do not have much time to act. For this reason, as the Secretary General of the United Nations stated at the beginning of 2022, we cannot afford to have greenwashing actions in progress.
The world is in a race against time. We cannot afford to backtrack, make missteps or engage in any form of greenwashing.
Antonio Guterres, United Nations Secretary General
We must ensure that zero emissions commitments are ambitious and credible and that they are in line with the highest standards of environmental integrity and transparency. They must also be actionable and take into account different circumstances.
From Greenwashing to Bluewashing: A Definition of the Most Used Strategies
Greenwashing and bluewashing are marketing and communication strategies implemented by companies, entities, organizations and individuals to convey an image of themselves as environmentally friendly and sustainable. In reality, these strategies only seek to shift the consumer’s attention from the negative impact that the entity involved has on the environment.
A strategy aimed at increasing sales of a product or improving one’s reputation to acquire new customers, increase turnover or become a leader in a certain sector, without actually committing to solving problems and making one’s work virtuous.
In reality, the communication that is carried out often omits important information, which would reveal the true impact of the company or entity on the environment. Generic and poorly defined terms deceive customers into believing that the company is doing more than it actually does.
With the term greenwashing, we refer to actions aimed more at the “green” part of the planet: woods, forests and green spaces in our cities. But we know that the same attention is also deserved by “blue” because 70% of the planet’s surface is covered by water, because the ocean is our greatest ally in mitigating the climate crisis and because our life depends on blue. The ocean, water resources and marine biodiversity are also not strangers to these commercial practices of facade. And this is where bluewashing comes from.
Bluewashing is not just about the ocean, “blue” also comes from the color of the United Nations logo. Many companies, organizations and entities of various kinds try to associate their name with the United Nations (UN) for the sole purpose of advertising their activities without actually taking action to support UN programs.
An example is the use of the Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda as a cover to work under the aegis of the principles formulated by the UN, but without actually working and collaborating in that direction.
It is much easier and more cost-effective to start a communication and marketing campaign than to review the entire strategy and activities to include good practices in daily work.
How to recognize bluewashing?
With the increase in interest of people and young people towards environmental and social issues, there are more and more organizations that try to ride the wave to expand their community and their customers using increasingly different techniques and therefore increasingly difficult to recognize, especially for those who do not deal with these topics on a daily basis.
Bluewashing goes beyond the single product, it can also be found in the actual work and strategy implemented by the company, organization, or person. Transparency, above all, and long-term coherence are the first elements that we can use to evaluate the work of a given entity, company or organization.
Some points to easily recognize some of the most common bluewashing actions:
1. Captivating and generic communication
The communication is generic and does not delve into the details because it is carried out in the absence of a concrete and mature commitment from the organization. Terms such as “sustainable”, “ocean-friendly”, “green”, “low impact”, “zero emission”, “100% recycled material”, “carbon neutral” are often used without reporting all the information necessary to evaluate the true environmental impact of the product.
In addition, to attract customers and promote “sustainable” products, colors are often used that do not reflect the company’s usual colors but that recall nature. Beige, green and blue are the favorite colors for environmental sustainability campaigns. In this way, the product seems to have a positive impact on the environment, but only in appearance.
For this reason, it is important not to be enchanted by a writing or a graphic but you have to go deeper. The best way to understand if a brand is truly responsible from an environmental and social point of view is to look for the information hidden in a so-called ecological product. While a company may indicate the use of recycled or organic materials in a product, they may not disclose how or where the product was made or how the materials were sourced.
Look for evidence and data: numbers are always more reliable than words. Reading labels, websites, researching articles and asking questions about the topic they are talking about is essential to understand how much they know, how much they are engaging and how interested they really are in the topic they are communicating.
One exercise we can do? Try to choose a low-impact sunscreen to use this summer.
2. It is a short-term initiative
The temporality of the action is important, to be concrete there must be a long-term plan.
If the initiative, project or product is part of a special, exclusive, one-off or short-term edition, it must ring an alarm bell. It is not uncommon for campaigns to be activated that are limited to only one line or a specific time frame, such as World Ocean, Environment or Planet Day.
Other examples could be beach cleaning campaigns supported by companies that are not exactly environmentally friendly. Beach cleaning certainly has a positive impact on the environment and, if done correctly, is an excellent tool for environmental education and for providing data to universities and research centers. But if the cleaning is carried out and promoted by the organization only for communication purposes, it remains an activity that is an end in itself to clean up the reputation and image of the brand.
Let’s not be fooled by an advertisement, let’s try to support those who work every day to improve their work and the environment in which we all live.
Only by educating ourselves can we be sure to invest in brands that take a holistic approach, finding new business models that integrate sustainability at the core, rather than focusing only on a specific product, collection or initiative.
3. It does not involve institutions, research centres or expert bodies in the sector
Often it is an initiative carried out by a single company and organization, without involving the institutions or bodies that work on the issue on a daily basis. Understanding who is behind the campaign and what the final goals of the initiative are is a further step to frame the action within a broader strategy.
4. It privatizes a common good
In the wake of international projects such as the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, many entities, organizations and companies have activated or are about to start ecosystem regeneration and restoration projects to support or accelerate the recovery of a specific habitat or ecosystem following damage, degradation or destruction.
These projects concern woods and forests but also the sea, through initiatives to restore coral reefs, mangrove forests, Cystoseira (now Ericaria) or Posidonia meadows. And so far, everything is fine.
However, these projects require a lot of caution, attention and knowledge of the sector. Placing the wrong species can cause more harm than good to the environment. Likewise, implementing a regeneration project without eradicating the problem that led to the damage to the ecosystem is a double-loss investment: capital and environmental.
For regeneration, reforestation and restoration projects to be successful, full collaboration with universities, research institutions, institutions, companies and local communities is necessary.
For this reason, it is essential – before buying or adopting a plant or a coral, for example – to inform ourselves about the nature and the premises of the entire project that our purchase would support..
What can we do?
Remember that greenwashing is not necessarily linked to the activity of a company, but can also be carried out by people, organizations, foundations and public bodies more or less consciously.
Currently, sustainability is a rapidly growing trend and to be kept up to date and not risk supporting greenwashing and bluewashing actions, you need to invest time, get informed and study a lot.
Before purchasing a product or supporting an organization or initiative, it is important to get informed and ask questions. If the organization is transparent and has nothing to hide, it will be available to provide all the requests you need and answer any doubts and curiosities.
As IOC-UNESCO Program Specialist Francesca Santoro reported at the Green&Blue Festival of la Repubblica, it is not easy. The important thing is to make the organizations understand that projects must be created on common values. It is not simply an exchange of money between profit and non-profit, customer and company, or between profit and research. Companies can change the way they produce and communicate their activities better.
It is not easy to find organizations that work with the common mission of contributing to environmental well-being without having as their goal the search for a market and commercial advantage. The responsibility is of each of us. Even in choosing who to support.
Bibliography:
https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/04/1117062
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195925520301529
https://www.decadeonrestoration.org
