Beyond the Green Label, a Distraction from Sustainability

Reporter: Macie Logan

PHOENIX-   

When Olivia Moran, an Arizona State University public policy student, was in high school, she was really passionate about sustainability and recycling until she found out her school was participating in greenwashing. She constantly tried her best to put her trash in the right bin, but lost the motivation to care when she found out all of the school's recycling went into the trash at the end of the night. 

“No matter how many steps forward everyone takes to care about the environment and be environmentally friendly, there's always something you can't control that's taking it five steps back,” Moran said. 

Greenwashing, or the act of an organization misleading the public by presenting themselves as more sustainable than they actually are, has decreased by 12% globally, but continues to increase in the U.S. making people become hopeless for the future of the environment while the government focuses on education, but some professionals say there is a simple solution to stop greenwashing. 

Examples of greenwashing include companies saying their products are made from 100% recycled plastic when in reality they aren’t, or companies saying for every item you buy one goes back to a family in need. 

In 2024, the amount of big company greenwashing grew by 30% in the U.S. and is blending into society more and more, according to data and research firm, RepRisk.

Moran said part of the reason greenwashing is so prominent in the U.S. is because people don’t care enough about the environment. 

“I see so many people just throwing stuff around for the love of the game, even with labels on the trash cans they are putting food in the recycling,” Moran said. “People do not care in the slightest.”

In 2024, 52% of consumers believed organizations were greenwashing their initiatives, up from 33% in 2023, according to RepRisk.

Carla De La Chapa, the new chief sustainability officer for the city of Phoenix, said the office of sustainability is monitoring waste data to make sure Phoenix is meeting the standards for sustainability and not participating in greenwashing. 

“There's a lot of checks and balances for cities to ensure they're staying within the standards and that's the fantastic part about Phoenix being in one of those C40 cities,” Chapa said. 

C40 cities are a network of city leaders who work together to confront climate crises focusing on transportation, global warming and air pollution. 

C40 says greenwashing can be tackled using education, however greenwashing isn’t mentioned on any Phoenix sustainability website or paperwork. It’s not even in the 2050 goals.

Chapa said education is at the top of the sustainability team’s list.

“We have recycling, we have compostable containers, we provide transportation with alternative fuels,” Chapa said. “We're not only operationally ensuring there's options there, but we’re really educating people.”

Around 40% of Americans report knowing very little about the requirements companies must follow to use green claims and 79% of Americans believe that companies using false or unverified green claims/labels should be severely fined, The European Consumer Organization found.

ASU sustainability professor, Craig Calhoun, said greenwashing is not the biggest issue at hand.

“Greenwashing is a distraction from dealing with the basic problems,” Calhoun said. “Because of greenwashing, we aren't focusing our attention where it would matter most.” 

Calhoun said America is living in an environmentally unsustainable way economically and technologically.

“Americans are wasting resources to make material items like iPhones, clothes and cars,” Calhoun said. “But these big companies are wasting natural resources like water, Native land, coal and minerals.” 

Americans are wasting natural resources by taking from indigenous and marginalized people, including mining in the Congo, in the former Soviet Union, and in various places where people don’t have the option to turn down such little pay, Calhoun said. 

Sarah Bentley, sustainability coordinator for the Phoenix Convention Center, said if a business wants to avoid greenwashing, then transparency is key. 

Everything should be data driven so any reports businesses put out are with real numbers and voices from the organizations they work with. The Phoenix Convention Center is making sure it is transparent, Bentley said. 

Being transparent about your failures is a good way to show you are honestly working toward being sustainable, Bentley said.

The convention center has multiple successful zero waste events like its Men's Final Four Fan Fest with 94% zero waste and 14% zero waste at the Women’s National Basketball Fan Fest, Bentley said. 

“It doesn't always work out and that's not something we're ashamed to say,” Bentley said. “For some major events, it worked because we had the collaboration and we had the infrastructure and then for another major event, it just didn't work because we didn't have the right playbook.” 

The most important thing is that businesses try their best not to participate in greenwashing by being accountable and transparent, Bentley said. 

“I think taking ownership of what you're able to do and being transparent about it is really important and making it a collaborative effort with the consumer, not putting it on the consumer,” Bentley said. 

Approximately 68% of U.S. executives and 58% of global executives admit to using greenwashing tactics, according to an anonymous survey conducted in 2022 by the Harris Poll for Google Cloud. 

In addition, Moran said the future of sustainability feels hopeless, but she continues to try and do what's right. 

“I don't consciously think about greenwashing most of the time because there's only so much mental weight you can have, but I love the environment and I always try to put everything in its proper place,” Moran said.

Chapa said the Phoenix Sustainability Office is thinking about the future of greenwashing as the future of sustainability changes. 

“We hope the future of Phoenix does not include any greenwashing,” Chapa said. “We're always working towards transparency and ensuring we fit the protocols and requirements to meet our sustainability and environmental goals.”

Calhoun said it is not going to solve all the problems of climate change by just recycling, but instead it comes down to what ordinary people are doing to get the knowledge to change.

Despite all of the things out of someone's control, Calhoun said the easiest solution to the U.S. sustainability crisis is for ordinary people to educate themselves and change small habits. 

“Ordinary people can ask, ‘Where does their energy come from?’ If they're getting it from Arizona Power Systems, they can ask APS, ‘What proportion of the electricity that I buy from you comes from green sources?’” Calhoun said.

Calhoun said the future of sustainability relies on doing things differently than we are now and making a change.

“That's going to get worse, not better, if we stay distracted and we don't make the necessary choices to confront more basic issues of energy use,” Calhoun said.

People can educate themselves in simple ways to become more sustainable in everyday life, Calhoun said. 

“That doesn't mean taking a political stand, it's not right or left and in every area of our lives, we can ask about what we consume and where it's coming from,” Calhoun said.