Tuesday 31 August 2010

Beware imaginary friends

An interesting trend that Im seeing emerge is companies developing their own little catch phrases or fancy names for their environmental activities.

Samsung has PlanetFirst (more like profit first), and FedEx has EarthSmart, Tesco has GreenLiving.

This is a dangerous progression. There is no external audit to prove any of the claims. Indeed a recent study by Which? in the EU indicated that Samsung PlanetFirst devices use only slighly less resources that the main stream ones... but cost more.

Companies need to stop making things up. They need to engage with real third parties like UNEP, Icharter or UNESCO and meet real standards.

7 comments:

  1. Most companies realise its easily to greenwash the public than to actually do something meaningful.

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  2. the FTC are coming out with a green code to cover which product are environmentally friendly

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  3. BlueGreenyellow01 September, 2010

    whatever happened to product green?

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  4. EarthSmart from FedEx isn't designed to indicate the environmental credentials of a product instead its a strategy used within the company to integrate environmental thinking

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  5. Samsung is clearly just jumping on the bandwagon. Trying to exploit green consumers. Expect LG and Sony to follow soon.

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  6. I work for Samsung, its a great company and it has done a lot to ensure that products are environmentally friendly.

    This includes looking at the entire product life cycle, ensuring that when its disposed that it does pollute. If you compare products with other companies you'd see that we have the best environmental content rating, very little chemicals like lead and mercury are used and our factories regularly win awards for reducing their footprint.

    While I totally agree that an external endorsement is more credible, it should not detract from the good work that are being done.

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  7. UNEP are completely useless, anything that UN does it ineffective, as there are too many hidden agendas.

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