Paper, Printing, and Cartons: Greenwashing: A Dirty Word in Packaging
By Maureen Kingsley
As The Wall Street Journal writer Keith Johnson explains in an “Environmental Capital” blog post from January 30 of this year, greenwashing occurs when companies “over-tout what they’re doing for the environment in order to win points with consumers.”
As environmentally aware as the members of the paper-carton community generally are, the industry is still not immune to the allure of exaggerating green claims. Pat McGee, director of marketing services for MeadWestvaco Health & Beauty Packaging, explains it this way: “We believe that most companies in our industry are sincere in their efforts to communicate the environmental or sustainable value of the products they sell. However, packaging sustainability is a complex subject. It’s a measure of inputs, processes, and outputs. We’ve all seen organizations take credit for good practices in any one of these areas, without explaining the impact in other areas.”
He cites as an example the issue of recycled content in packaging. “It’s considered a positive sustainability benefit—an input. But only by understanding the impacts of the process itself (manufacturing, transportation, etc.) and the output (package weight, performance, recyclability, etc.) can net sustainability be properly discussed.”
Dave Lunati, director of marketing for Monadnock Paper Mills, points to the effectiveness of obtaining third-party verifications to partially avoid greenwashing. With groups such as the Forest Stewardship Council, for instance, “you have to actually get clearance from them whenever you use their image, logos, or language. There’s a pretty good monitoring regime out there. That’s why we encourage our customers to take a look at third-party verification.”
Lunati, McGee, and Don Droppo Jr., senior vice president of marketing and sales for Curtis Packaging, are all believers in and supporters of the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides, which were first issued in 1992 and are finally being revised for the first time since 1998. The Green Guides are documents provided by FTC to help marketers avoid making environmental claims that are unfair or deceptive under Section 5 of the FTC Act.
The decade-long dearth of Green Guides updates “has allowed a lot of companies to make some pretty outrageous claims as they relate to their products’ environmental profile,” says Lunati. Fortunately, as part of FTC’s revision process, the organization is holding a series of public meetings to discuss various green marketing issues. One such meeting held in April of this year focused specifically on developments in green packaging claims and consumer perceptions of such claims. According to FTC’s Web site, that workshop focused on “the range of claims marketers use to tout that their product packaging is ‘green,’ such as recyclable, biodegradable, compostable, and sustainable.”
The hope is that once the Green Guides are reissued, rampant greenwashing across all industries will subside. In the meantime, the truly environmentally conscious companies may do a little policing of their less-virtuous competitors. “From where I sit,” says Droppo, “I see and hear things that some of my competition is doing that I can completely poke holes all the way through. I haven’t done anything about it yet, but we’ll see.”
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