When Coca-Cola was announced as a sponsor of COP27 – the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference – it caused outrage. Why? Because Coca-Cola is also the biggest plastic polluter.
Its biggest impact comes from its business model: manufacturing and selling bottled beverages. That said, the company’s efforts to improve this model by closing the loop on packaging production, such as via recycling and lower-impact materials, are encouraged. Yet these changes are slow. It seems that in this case, sponsoring a leading sustainability conference is more of a diversion from Coca-Cola’s struggle to improve its impact. A fast-track way to polish the company’s image as a “green hero”, which should keep CSR budgets well-spent and shareholders happy.
Experts think that is at the least misleading, because consumers may infer that Coca Cola is already a sustainable company, and thus it would discourage the company from making real changes.
Greenwashing refers to making false, misleading, overstated, or unsubstantiated claims about an organization’s environmental impact. It goes without saying that such claims, once disproved, will shake society’s trust in a business, causing it to lose clients, investors, and partners. And yet, it happens at a huge scale.
The Recursive spoke to five communication experts from varied fields such as non-profit sector, tech startups, media, and PR, to understand what is causing greenwashing and how to avoid it.
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