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This article is part of the Building a Sustainable Business series about starting and running a sustainable business. Read all the articles here.
I have known for several years that BuildingGreen publishes unbiased information on green building products, but I didn’t know they had a great report that covers everything you need to know about certifications until about two weeks ago. After tearing my hair out for a couple years trying to figure out the green certification process, I got their report called Green Building Product Certifications. It costs a measly $79 and it’s worth every penny. Just to be clear, I do not have a relationship with this group. The $79 doesn’t go into my bank account, but I will be eternally grateful that I don’t have to fight my way through the maze of certifiers and certifying consultants, paying thousands of dollars for the information clearly laid out in this report.
BuildingGreen is the Consumer Reports of building products. They don’t accept advertising and they thoroughly research everything they review. Many construction companies and architects rely on their analyses of building products, especially new ones.
What I really like is that it not only tells you what’s good to have but it also provides ammunition to prove that some certifying groups are just greenwashers and not worth the paper their certificate is printed on. This has seriously puzzled me. When I look at the companies and products that have received certification and I know that the companies are making products that can kill me, I worried that I would be forced to join the lunatics running the asylum. No more.
Here’s a wonderful rundown of greenwashing taken from the report:
Green by Association
A company slathers itself and its marketing materials in environmental terms and images so that even if its products have no environmental benefits, consumers associate them with positive environmental attributes. Take, for example gas-guzzling cars and trucks pictured in remote natural settings or housing developments named for natural features that they have destroyed.
Lack of Definition
Marketing a product that makes environmental claims that sound good to the consumer but are basically meaningless, such as a product described as being non-toxic or without hazardous chemicals, when these definitions are only meaningful in specific contexts. For example, many chemicals are non-toxic to the touch but harmful to ingest. Or a radiant-barrier paint product is advertised as having a high insulation value, but the ad neglects to mention that it only insulates that well when installed at temperature differentials in the thousands of degrees.
Unproven Claims
Environmental claims are made by a company with absolutely no evidence to back them up. For example, a company claims to have implemented a new manufacturing process to increase its product’s recycled content but doesn’t certify the claim. A manufacturer claims to have eliminated hazardous ingredients from a product but claims that due to trade secrets, it can’t reveal any proof.
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The Non Sequitur
A company uses a valid claim about a product as the basis for a further claim that is not warranted. They say that its product is resistant to mold growth and also implies that using the product benefits indoor environmental quality—a claim that would need to be evaluated separately.
Forgetting the Life Cycle aka The Red Herring
A company chooses one easily understood feature of a product’s positive environmental impact while ignoring significant negative impacts. For example, a countertop that’s made of recycled content but uses large amounts of energy to produce and contains binders that could impact the health of the family using it.
Bait and Switch
A company heavily promotes the environmental attributes of a single product while selling and manufacturing similar products that lack the same environmental attributes. For example, a forest products company sells a FSC-certified product but produces the product in very small volumes at such a high price that most of its sales are for non-certified products.
Rallying Behind a Lower Standard
A product earns a third-party certification developed by the product’s manufacturer or trade association. For example, after getting bad press for its resistance to a certification program for sustainable manufacturing of widgets, a widget trade association creates its own program with similar but much more vague standards.
Reluctant Enthusiast
Oil companies are famous for fighting higher environmental standards, arguing that protecting the earth is too costly, while at the same time spending vast amounts of money in court. When the company realizes it’s losing the battle, it then adjusts and makes the changes, proclaiming its ‘greenness’ in meeting the standards while continuing to fight efforts toward higher standards.
Outright Lying
Either intentionally or inadvertently, a company bends the truth or simply ignores it. For example, a product is displayed with an environmental certification that it hasn’t actually earned, or a glass manufacturer claims recycled content based on reuse of scrap within a manufacturing line which doesn’t meet the definition of recycled.
Greenwashers need to be exposed but consumers need information to do so. The report includes the folks that certify the certifiers, helps you understand what to look for when trying to certify your product, and will save you thousands by guiding you away from the sharks.
So watch out! I am now armed and dangerous, ready to take on the evil manufacturers and their greenwashed certifications.
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Image may be NSFW.
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Priscilla Burgess is CEO, co-founder, and co-inventor of Bellwether Materials, an award-winning, triple-bottom line company that manufactures deep green building insulation made from an agricultural by-product. Before founding Bellwether Materials, she ran her own management consulting business. She has traveled all over the world, asking questions about how people work and from that, has developed several models and many opinions about the best way to grow a flourishing business.
image: Sven Van Echelpoel via Flickr cc (some rights reserved)