Greening or Green Washing? Thought-provoking Guardian article.

The false gospel of green marketing | Guardian Sustainable Business | guardian.co.uk: "The trend continues among heavy resource depleters. Chevron is outdoing its highly-mocked campaign, People Do, with the affable and somewhat disingenuous We Agree campaign. In the We Agree campaign, Chevron uses actors to impersonate real people asking for local jobs and renewable energy. Their own staff members explain that they support those aspirations as well. The ads are reminiscent of British Petroleum's Beyond Petroleum campaign, which, after the recent Macondo oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, became more of a punchline than a tagline.

The period of 2007-08 took this type of greenwashing to a whole new level, with a growing belief among consumer product manufacturers that appealing to a newly activated breed of green consumers would not only benefit brand equity but create incremental sales. Fiji water, one of the best-selling premium bottled water brands, launched a marketing campaign proclaiming that "every drop is green." Really? Despite some very good conservation efforts on the ground in Fiji, there's no way that shipping water thousands of miles could ever be green."

Greenwashing occurs anytime there is more talking green than doing green by a brand. A brand's marketing of its green aspects should resemble an iceberg: only the tip is visible, but below the water's surface lies the vast majority of the good news. Some marketers greenwash by focusing on an inconsequential environmental feature, like wrapping a steak in a compostable package and calling it "climate-friendly". Other marketers adopt green packaging without changing their behaviours, like Campbell's Soup, which launched an Earth Day green-colored soup can, but didn't bother buying organic chicken or lowering the salt content. At the most basic level, these companies have ignored that sustainability is complex and has four co-equal streams – social, economic, cultural and environmental. Greenwashers often try to focus on just one of these four pillars, while obscuring the rest.

Before you conclude that all "sustainable" products are a fraud, consider the range of commendable products and services that haven't called upon the tropes of green marketing. Marks & Spencer's Plan A project ("Plan A, because there is no Plan B") swathes staffers in hipster black clothes and stays away from the maudlin use of ferns and leaves to suggest goodness. The greatest benefit for Marks & Spencer has been the effect on employees, who've enjoyed connecting their daily work to a corporate initiative that makes them proud. Ebay may be the ultimate green machine, turning used junk into valuable collectibles, but you'll rarely see it trumpet its green credentials. Ebay's new Common Threads clothes recycling partnership with Patagonia is a model for building second lives for products. Xerox produces copiers which contain more than 80% reused or recycled parts. Even though Xerox is one of the largest branded paper sellers in the world, it tries to get its customers to stop using paper and choose Xerox digital products instead. You won't see it at a green festival. AirBnB is renting rooms without having to build new hotels, but the environmental aspects of its business is largely unspoken. The common denominator between all of these businesses is that their efficient use of resources is good for their core business, even if it's not particularly important to their consumers as a marketing message.

"Green" is an aspirational destination that no brand or processed product will ever reach. Those brands that are truly on the journey towards having a positive impact on the natural and human environment are far too humble to pound their chest and declare their verdance. Instead of swathing a product in a coat of green paint and streaming out into the trenches like Woodrow Wilson called for in his speech in 1916, marketers today are better off putting the effort into reinventing their products.

Adam Werbach, chief sustainability officer for Saatchi & Saatchi, is the author of Strategy for Sustainability and tweets at @adamwerbach. He often wears mismatched socks.