Time to clean up the greenwash
Greenwashing is increasingly becoming a hot topic, as businesses and organisations the world over clamour to be a part of the environmental movement.
While intentions are often good, those who have done their climate change homework, will know that all is not always what it seems in the land of corporate promises – and, rather surprisingly, British Cycling has just found itself in the eye of that storm.
For those new to the concept, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, greenwashing is defined as what you do “to make people believe that your company is doing more to protect the environment than it really is”, and British Cycling is in the spotlight after announcing an eight-year partnership with oil giant, Shell.
Friends of the Earth energy campaigner, Jamie Peters, said: “Cycling is the epitome of environmentally friendly travel. It’s deeply disappointing that UK Cycling could think it’s appropriate to partner with a fossil fuel giant”, while Greenpeace UK policy director, Dr Doug Parr, added that after “being booted out of museums and other cultural institutions, Big Oil are looking at sports as the next frontier for their brazen greenwash.”
And environmental bodies aren’t the only ones critical of the decision. An avalanche of complaints on social media has resulted in many members of British Cycling threatening to cancel their subscriptions. While an open letter to British Cycling, calling for the governing body to “reject greenwashing and sportwashing by major polluters” by renouncing its sponsorship deal with Shell, has been signed by more than 700 organisations and individuals.
And who can blame them? Sustainability is currently a key issue for the sport and so the decision to formally link with a major oil and gas producer, whose record on environmental issues leaves a lot to be desired, is more than a little questionable.
British Cycling isn’t the only organisation to hit the headlines this month for environmental issues. The UK’s largest power station, Drax, also made the news for cutting down environmentally important forests, while receiving billions of pounds in green energy subsidies from UK taxpayers.
The Yorkshire plant burns millions of tonnes of imported wood pellets, which is classed as renewable energy, and claims to use only sawdust and waste wood in the process. But an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama programme revealed that some of the wood comes from primary forests in Canada, which are thousands of years old.
That doesn’t make great reading for the converted coal plant, which produces 12% of the UK’s renewable electricity and has received £6bn in green energy subsidies.
As the world gears up to the UN Climate Change Conference COP 27 in Egypt next month and, here in Wales, we get ready for Wales Climate Week from 21-25 November, it’s a shame that the green stories hitting the headlines are doing so for all the wrong reasons. But history tells us that they’re not the first culprits of greenwashing – and they won’t be the last.
You may remember that, back in 2019, McDonalds introduced paper straws, which turned out to be non-recyclable, and just last year, fashion retailer H&M was called out by the Changing Markets Foundation for its insincere sustainable fashion claims. Its study into the truthfulness of sustainability claims by high street fashion brands found that 59% of them flouted the UK Competition and Markets Authority guidelines in some way, with one of the biggest culprits being H&M, with 96% false claims.
Perhaps our 21st century greenwashing is what we would have once simply called a lack of integrity. Integrity is about living your values doing what you say and saying what you do. Why major brands with their multi-million pound promotional budgets trip up on this concept is baffling to many – but all power to those who call them out.
The reality is you have to credit your audience with intelligence and your customers with the respect they deserve. Let’s hope mistakes of the past can be lessons for the future. Environmental change is work in progress for all of us, but we’ll never deliver the change we need if we’re pretending to do more than we are to protect the environment.
This article was written by our chief executive, Angharad Neagle, and featured in the Western Mail on 17 October 2022