A Digital Greenwashing Guide: Consequences, Examples, and Action Items

Image from Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services, O’Reilly Media.

New regulatory guidance on greenwashing in the European Union (EU) and the United States may change how organizations can talk about their sustainability initiatives. In some cases, failure to make true claims could lead to potential fines or penalties.

How might this impact your digital marketing or digital sustainability efforts? In this post, we dig into the details and share several digital greenwashing examples.

Use this digital greenwashing guide to help you make accurate sustainability claims about digital products, services, and programs while reducing risk as new and emerging legislation takes shape.

What is Digital Greenwashing?

Greenwashing [ green-wosh-ing, -waw-shing ]: Activities by a company or an organization that are intended to make people think that it is concerned about the environment, even if its real business actually harms the environment.

— Oxford Learner’s Dictionary definition of Greenwashing

Greenwashing — the act of making inaccurate, misleading, or incomplete claims about the environmental impact or benefits of your product, service, or organization — has been around for many decades. However, the new EU and pending U.S. greenwashing directives mentioned above will likely make this topic a more urgent concern for organizations across sectors moving forward.

Related, digital greenwashing applies the concept of greenwashing specifically to the digital products and services an organization creates or uses. Digital greenwashing has two important distinctions:

1. Using technology to intentionally spread disinformation about an organization’s sustainability efforts.
2. Making false or misleading claims about the environmental impacts of an organization’s digital products, services, or programs.

Many green digital claims don’t acknowledge that digital sustainability is complex and — given the vast number of third-party subscription services involved — doesn’t often include digital supply chain impacts. This undermines scope 3 emissions reporting for digital products and services. Also, it just scratches the surface of what’s really happening in web systems.

Given the often misunderstood nature of digital sustainability, the likelihood of an organization engaging in digital greenwashing — intentionally or not — is high.

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How Widespread is Digital Greenwashing?

53% of green claims give vague, misleading or unfounded information. 40% of claims have no supporting evidence. Half of all green labels offer weak or nonexistent verification. There are 230 sustainability labels and 100 green energy labels in the EU, with vastly different levels of transparency.

— EU Greenwashing Directive

With over half of companies’ green claims offering vague or otherwise misleading information, greenwashing is a significant problem that’s on the rise — hence the need for legislation.

However, digital greenwashing is nowhere near as widespread. As a still nascent practice, digital sustainability has yet to reach the global business community’s collective consciousness.

With that being said, we could see a rise in digital greenwashing as:

• Green IT and related practices become more commonplace, and
• Legislation around the world shifts toward more transparency, especially for climate disclosures.

This is particularly true when people make claims about digital emissions and “green” websites. We’re already seeing discrepancies in how organizations talk about these things. This can drive mis/disinformation. As more teams and organizations begin adopting digital sustainability practices, we must be vigilant in ensuring the claims they make are accurate and truthful.

The number of greenwashing court cases in the U.S. (above) and abroad is steadily rising.

The Consequences of Greenwashing

Greenwashing litigation is rising around the globe (see pages 39–40 in PDF), from just a few cases in the United States a decade or so ago to dozens by 2023 (see image above). Sources list a variety of reasons for lawsuits, including:

1. Disinformation: Making false claims or spreading inaccurate information.
2. Full disclosure: Statements that withhold information or otherwise don’t tell the whole story.
3. Scientific data: Flawed calculations or incomplete evidence leads to false claims.
4. Ratings or labels: Product or service labels offer misleading information about environmental credentials.
5. Net zero: Confusion around carbon offsets and net zero claims translate to organizations making misleading statements about their emissions.

New regulatory greenwashing guidelines could put any one of these issues front-and-center for organizations across sectors in the near future, especially when fines or penalties are associated with legislative non-compliance. We’re likely to see an explosion of lawsuits moving forward once these laws go into effect.

For a broader list of policies that affect digital sustainability, check out Web Sustainability Laws & Policies by the W3C Sustainable Web Design community group. The message is clear: make truthful statements about sustainability efforts, backed up with scientific data, to avoid fines or lawsuits. This includes marketing claims related to digital products and services.

The combination of an ever-changing legislative landscape and an easily misunderstood emerging discipline creates an environment that’s ripe for digital greenwashing. With that in mind, let’s look at some examples.

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Digital Greenwashing Examples

Below are just two examples of digital greenwashing. Compiling this list was tough. It required us to look critically at ourselves and our industry. Some of these organizations are doing potentially great things. However, in the name of transparency, continuous improvement, and accountability in a growing digital sustainability industry, it is our responsibility to assess as we go.

Example One: Green Website Badges

Proclaiming your website is more green than it actually is spreads misinformation in an emerging discipline that should be grounded in truth and transparency.

What it is

Organizations create “green” web badges for customers to use on their websites. These tags are intended to showcase a website’s green credentials based on hosting choices, purchased carbon offsets, and other schemes.

Why it’s greenwashing

While green web hosting is an important step toward creating an internet that’s entirely powered by renewable energy, it is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Yes, it is admirable to commit to powering your hosting with renewable energy. However, the web has many moving parts, each of which present significant emissions challenges.

Claiming that a website is “300% green” because of a hosting choice as in the example above is misleading. It ignores emissions associated with other parts of the system, like end user devices, network hardware, third-party services, and so on. Plus, these badges don’t consider other environmental impacts — like water use, e-waste, rare earth mineral mining, and so on.

What to do instead

Consider the following:

• First, share details about your green hosting choice: who, why, how, etc. Include this information in blog posts and annual impact reports. Back up claims with clear data and statistics. Don’t tout your green credentials, but rather educate and inform.
• Do your level best to reduce emissions associated with digital products and services first before considering offsets. Then, only use carbon offset solutions from verified providers.

If you still feel compelled to use a website badge, make it an opportunity to educate people about sustainability across the web. Link to blog posts that clearly explain these issues rather than the hosting provider’s homepage, which serves no one other than the provider.

Most importantly, be transparent about how far you still have to go. We’re all learning in real-time when it comes to digital sustainability. Being clear about this fact encourages trust.

With so many website emissions tools on the market, each offering different methods and results, spreading misinformation — intentionally or otherwise — is inevitable.

Example Two: Digital Emissions ‘Calculations’

There are now dozens of online website carbon tools. Many of them offer free digital carbon estimates. Unfortunately, these estimates are used to promote misleading claims.

What it is

Companies use data from online greenhouse gas (GHG) estimation tools to make unclear claims about emissions from their digital products and services. Sometimes this is done using website badges, similar to the example above. Other times, the misleading data appears in impact reports, social media posts, press releases, online articles, and so on. This is problematic.

Why it’s greenwashing

Similar to example #1, the figures offered by most “carbon calculators” only represent broad stroke estimates for a complex and always-changing technology system at a single point in time. Worse, some companies behind these tools use them as excuses to drive carbon offset purchases, which isn’t the most viable or recommended approach to digital sustainability.

These tools are great for jumpstarting conversations within organizations that wouldn’t otherwise prioritize digital sustainability. However, the main problem lies in translating the information they provide to organizational marketing campaigns and communications strategies. When companies don’t clearly acknowledge data gaps, their claims are misleading. The language we use to describe digital GHG models matters.

What to do instead

IAB Europe’s Sustainability Standards Committee offers clear language recommendations on how to talk about your digital emissions evaluation initiatives. For example:

• Use evaluation or assessment over measurement.
• Consider emissions estimates vs. emissions calculations.
• To represent the full spectrum of greenhouse gases, opt for GHG assessment or GHG evaluation over carbon-specific language.
• Similarly, use GHG Estimator or GHG Models over carbon calculators.

We always strive to improve how our own web sustainability tool, Ecograder, and the Sustainable Web Design site present this information. We encourage others to do the same.

Beyond using IAB’s language guidelines, also consider investing in a digital life cycle assessment to better understand the full environmental impact of digital products and services you create and use. Free online estimation tools don’t offer a complete picture of your website’s environmental impact.

Find more digital greenwashing examples in the full Mightybytes article.

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Seven Action Items to Avoid Digital Greenwashing

“Greenwashing confuses the public, minimises the severity of the global climate crisis and so ultimately pushes us closer to climate catastrophe.”

— Harriet Lamb in Number of adverts banned for ‘greenwashing’ triples in a year, The Independent

Organizations must take responsibility for the social, economic, and environmental impacts of their digital products and services. To reduce the risk of digital greenwashing, consider these seven action items:

1. Understand “why”: First, whether you’re looking at digital emissions or broader digital sustainability efforts, ask why is it important to make a claim? Is it for reporting compliance, to create an improvement roadmap, to keep up with the competition, or to satisfy a request from leadership? The rationale matters.
2. Assess risk: Next, before making any digital sustainability claims, assess the risk of doing so. What unintended circumstances might come from your actions?
3. Business ecosystems: Explore the systems in which you do this work through activities like stakeholder mapping to inform business decisions and better understand stakeholder needs.
4. Sustainability frameworks: Align your sustainability storytelling and reporting efforts with existing frameworks or known standards whenever possible to reduce potential pitfalls.
5. Be specific: Sweat the details. Specificity matters, especially if you want to avoid lawsuits or fines.
6. Data-driven decisions: Define-and use-a sustainable data strategy to back up your claims with data and clear statistics.
7. Continuous improvement: Own your mistakes and work to improve out in the open; share what you learn along the way and ground all your work in honesty and transparency.

It is surprising how few companies successfully address the full list above. Good data and digital governance practices will go a long way toward operationalizing digital sustainability practices within your organization. However, this requires buy-in from leadership and an educated marketing and communications team tasked with training both internal and external stakeholders on the issues.

Digital Greenwashing: Final Thoughts

Technology can help us design and build a more sustainable future. However, when we use it to intentionally misinform people or, worse, create technology that itself has destructive traits which undermine social and environmental progress, we sabotage our chances to successfully achieve this future. This is unacceptable, especially in the face of a climate crisis.

What’s more, when marketing and communications leaders don’t educate themselves or take due diligence steps to ensure their sustainability claims are accurate and truthful, this puts the organizations they work for at legal and financial risk. To address this, we must redefine success in marketing so it does no harm.

This article does not provide legal advice. Should you require legal assistance, please consult a lawyer.

A version of this article was originally published by Mightybytes. B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.