Max Dunn, October 2008
BUS-183, Sustainable Design 

It would be easy to criticize any company or product for not being “green enough”. Even an eco-friendly company like Simple Shoes could be criticized for using metal eyelets or not taking back its shoes for recycling. However, we shouldn’t be too harsh on companies taking their first steps towards being eco-friendly. For instance, Clorox has come out with a “Green Works” line of cleaners that they claim “contains over 99%  natural ingredients that are biodegradable” and “use recyclable packaging”. As long as these claims are true, we shouldn’t berate them for not doing more. 

So a claim of greenwashing should only be applied to a company that violates one or more of these principles:

• The Sin of Hidden Tradeoff - Promoting a single green factor of a product without any attention to other important issues.
• The Sin of No Proof - Unsubstantiated claims. For example, claiming a product was not tested on animals, but with no third party certification.
• Sin of Vagueness - Poorly defined or overly broad claims, such as "chemical free."
• Sin of Irrelevance - A claim that may be true, but is either unimportant or otherwise irrelevant.
• Sin of Fibbing - Claims of certification that are false.
• Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils - A claim that may be true, but distracts from greater environmental impacts.

(From: TerraChoice’s Six Sins of Greenwashing)

Green Product - Simple Shoes

Simple Shoes was started in 1991 and in 2004 adopted a goal of using 100% sustainable products.

Pros: 

• Foot forms and boxes are 100% post-consumer recycled paper. 
• Most shoes use water-based glues. 
• Reuses car tires and bike tires. 
• Laces made from recycled plastic. 
• Organic cotton, bamboo and hemp. 
• Uses BLC leather and ISO 14001 suede. 

Cons: 

• No recycling program for used shoes. 
• Some shoes have metal eyelets that make it harder to recycle
• BLC and ISO 14001 guidelines don’t guarantee eco-friendliness

Sample Product: Skiff Hemp Shoe

• Contain no animal byproducts
• Hemp uppers
• Outsole made from a used car tire
• Toe and heel bumpers are old bike tires
• Lined with certified organic cotton
• Recycled PET wrapped latex elastic

(Source: Simple Shoes and Simple Story Video)

(See also: How Green are ‘Organic’ Shoes)

Greenwashed Product - Fiji Water 

Claims that by 2010

• 25% smaller carbon footprint
• Will be carbon negative through offsets
• 20% packaging reduction
• 50% renewable energy for bottling facility and company-owned vehicles

Also claims:

• Saving Fiji rainforest
• Their bottles contribute little to municipal waste
• Use only PET because it is less wasteful than glass
• Wants consumers to recycle

(Source: http://www.fijigreen.com)

All of this is likely true. It still doesn’t mitigate the fact that bottled water in general is in no way eco-friendly, and bottled water shipped from Fiji is extremely wasteful. As Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network remarked: “Bottled water is a business that is fundamentally, inherently and inalterably unconscionable.”