You may have already heard about the efforts being made by fast fashion brands such as H&M to move towards sustainable and eco-friendly practices in their production and marketing methods. They use fair trade materials, recycled bottles, organic cotton… Sounds good, right? It really does, in theory. The fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters among economic actors, and the public pressure to reduce their impact on the environment has been a prominent factor of the social discourse for years now. Their efforts to reduce the harmful effects of their business practices are very welcome and should be encouraged! However, this fact means that with the best of intentions, we might enable brands to mask their unsustainable practices behind green PR.
Greenwashing is the marketing practice of big businesses that consists of misleading consumers to persuade them that a brand is eco-friendly by focusing on their ‘green’ or sustainable actions; while in fact the business is still using the same harmful and unsustainable practices. The problematic thing is not the eagerness of businesses to use their sustainable actions to promote themselves. It is the element of falsehood and manipulation inherent in such campaigns. In the earlier example, H&M markets itself as a green and sustainable brand with an environmentally ‘woke’ attitude. However, H&M still continues to operate the fundamentally unsustainable fast fashion model of business. While classic fashion houses release up to 2 collections per year, fast fashion businesses release up to 18 collections within just one year, which has disastrous effects on the environment with the amount of waste and pollution this results in.
It is not only the environment that suffers as a result of greenwashing. Many reports indicate that greenwashing helps conceal the instances of labour rights infringement and the exploitation of women in developing countries, where most fast fashion houses produce their clothes. Greenwashing helps create an ethical, socially acceptable and even laudable image for the brands in question. Especially recently, since climate change is at the forefront of the collective consciousness and a major concern for young people, who are often the main target audiences of brands’ campaigns, it is important for us to know that such practices are manipulating our perception of the company. This does not only happen in the fast fashion industry, either. One of the biggest greenwashing scandals concerned Volkswagen alleging that their diesel emissions were lesser than their competitors, which was fraudulent.
Distinguishing between genuine eco-friendly and green practices and scarce actions aimed at creating a thin, greenwashed windscreen is essential. There should be a holistic, broad investigation into the objectives of the businesses in question and the consistency of their actions, as opposed to blown-out appeals of billboards for which they paid to appear in a very specific light. Complacency should be left in the days behind us, and we should make efforts to be conscious, informed consumers who go out of their way to support the businesses that deserve it.