I love that little self-congratulatory feeling I get when I do something good for the environment. The easiest way to give myself the eco-friendly warm and fuzzies is when the green option is also the path of least resistance, like when I drop a printed proof of this blog into the recycling bin below my desk instead of the trash (which just so happens to be an annoying distance away on the other side of the office).
Hotel towels have always been a great source of inspiration for one of these easy eco ego massages. I'm talking about those little placards by the shower in the hotel room that say: "Unnecessary washing wastes water and harms the environment. Be part of the solution. Hang your towel on the rack to re-use it. Leave it on the floor to have it washed." With a sweet sigh of contentment, I'll always hang my towel back up. I'll spend a moment taking pride in my selfless act of environmentalism (forgetting, for that moment, that my towels at home are only deemed ready for the laundry if they fail the 'sniff test').
Do you also celebrate this same little victory for Mother Earth? Then stop reading now, because I'd hate to be the one to burst your soap bubble when I explain that hotels don't employ this practice for the environment – they do it to save money on the cleaning bill. This practice dates back to the golden age of green marketing hyperbole, and helped coin the term 'greenwashing' (a composite of 'whitewashing' – the laundry connection was coincidental).
We're all at the mercy of overzealous environmental marketing day in and day out. It's so rife that the Advertising Standards Association (ASA) is on red (or perhaps green) alert. One recent casualty to the ASA's policy on greenwashing includea an absolute corker from Shell, whose marketing said "We use our waste CO2 to grow flowers". The actual amount was found to be somewhat too low to warrant a national press advertising campaign – 0.325% of emissions make it to a flower bed.
I must, however, applaud a brewer in my native Australia for marketing an "eco-beer" – the stubbie that just keeps on giving. But surely a carbon neutral lager would be flat?
Working in print means working with paper, which means turning the greenwash radar to full strength. I remember early this year when the villain in the final Harry Potter novel was not Voldemort but a lack of FSC-certified paper for the Finish-language version. Apparently JK Rowling had a diva moment and demanded only FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) paper be used for the edition, throwing the Fins in a spin because they generally opt for the rival PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification) scheme. Ignoring the fact that the story turned out to be hogwash at Hogwarts, the underlying fact is that FSC certification has won a marketing battle against the more widespread and equally sustainable PEFC scheme. It has reached a point in the UK where people consider FSC as a the last word in Chain of Custody certifications. This is particularly strange in Europe as PEFC was created specifically as an alternative for the paper industry in our temperate climate – FSC had been created to protect against deforestation in the tropics). The danger of this greenwash is it distracts people from the real threat, which is deforestation in general.
For years, paper has been under attack, as imaginary swathes of pristine Amazon rainforest were massacred to allow us to print out our emails (which always seem to take two sheets of A4 cartridge paper because, ironically, the single line containing the words "Do you really need to print this email?" are knocked over to the otherwise blank second page). In fact, the National Association of Paper Merchants (NAPM) is using its 'Two Sides' environmental campaign to show that far from being the great evil, paper production is completely sustainable. According to figures the NAPM sourced from the Australian Paper Industry Association: "The paper industry has eight representatives in the UN's list of the world's 100 most sustainable companies, more than any other industry."
So victim, rather than perpetrator, of negative environmental marketing?
Well yes. The confusion arises when paper companies start using facts of their sustainability as proof that they are intrinsically caring and compassionate souls with a policy of conservation for conservation's sake. The simple fact is that to make profits from a chopping down forests, you need to replant them. It's a commercial imperative, not an environmental one. When those facts are muddled, it's just the hotel towels scenario by another name, and the sniff test reeks of PR spin.