If you’re interested enough to be reading this, you probably know about greenwashing. Greenwashing means communicating misleading, dubious or simply incorrect claims about your organisation’s sustainability, ESG or purposeful business activities. Whilst the term has come into common use only in the last decade or so, the concept has a long and inglorious history. The term was coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986, although there are older examples of the practice. For example, in 1962, Westinghouse advertised its nuclear power division, calling the plants “clean and safe”. As meltdowns had already occurred in other nuclear plants, “safe” was debatable, and there was no mention of the issues around nuclear waste in the campaign either.
More recently, we have seen “greenhushing” terminology used more frequently. This is a somewhat more complex and nuanced concept than greenwashing, which always has negative connotations. Greenhushing was coined in 2008 by brand strategist Jerry Stifelman and writer Sami Grover in a blog post (now inaccessible) for Treehugger.com. It applies most often to environmental performance when organisations choose not to communicate their sustainability efforts.
However, that silence may be rooted in good intentions. For instance, many organisations are now getting better at tracking their Scope 3 emissions – those arising through their supply / value chains. Imagine the (fictional) PSmith Corporation. We have been asking our major suppliers to tell us about their emissions for the last five years. We have also worked diligently to share good practice and encourage suppliers to reduce emissions, even removing a few from our supply chain as they were not taking strong enough action.
But as our suppliers get better at measuring and monitoring their own emissions (which of course includes their own Scope 3 data), they are reporting higher emissions numbers. That makes the PSmith Corporation numbers look less than impressive. The irony is that we are doing everything we should, yet to the public, the regulators, our customers, we don’t look good. So a logical response might be to simply shut up about our performance, or report the bare minimum of regulatory data.
Now another form of greenwashing might be less excusable. Perhaps the PSmith Corp just hasn’t really done much – and our emissions, Scopes 1, 2 and 3 have all risen, as well as some dodgy human rights issues coming to light in our supply chain. Then silence is golden (as the Tremeloes put it), and again we’re better off saying nothing. But in either case, greenhushing means we don’t know whether the organisation is taking a lot of positive action or not.
So now we come onto greenrinsing, which I must admit is relatively new to me. It takes elements of greenwashing, or may be seen as a subset of greenwashing, but as Baldrick might have said, involves a “cunning plan”. An organisation applies greenrinsing when it changes its sustainability targets in order to look better in the eyes of its stakeholders – customers, investors, regulators, maybe even staff.
This might be driven by understandable concerns as organisations do their best, but find the targets they set are inappropriate or genuinely unachievable. Sometimes we see organisations change their targets in an open way, explaining why they are taking this action. Even Unilever, famously one of the pioneers in this field, had to revise some of their original 2010 targets set by CEO Paul Polman when they realised they were virtually impossible to achieve, or progress could not be measured accurately.
But again, greenrinsing could be driven by less worthy motives, in cases where the organisation hasn’t got its act together, and decides to change targets simply to conceal its failure.
So, if you are analysing any organisation’s performance, including your own suppliers, watch out for greenhushing and greenrinsing, as well as greenwashing. But I’m sure it goes without saying that your own organisation would not dream of following any of those strategies…!