The Pollution Prevention Regional Information Center (P2RIC) strives to improve resource sharing for waste reduction between the programs, businesses, and agencies of EPA Region 7 (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska). P2RIC shares success stories in Region 7 as a way to increase dialogue for businesses wishing to implement sustainable practices.
Recently, the P2RIC contacted me to speak with them about the differences between Greenwashing and Sustainable Marketing. Greenwashing is not a complementary term, it is ‘the practice of making an unsubstantiated or misleading claim about the environmental benefits of a product, service, technology or company practice.’
In the recent rush to go green, greenwashing has oftentimes become synonymous with green marketing - which makes the job of marketing a company’s genuine green efforts all the more difficult. It can be easy, if not even tempting, for a company to slip into the unsavory realm of greenwashing. According to local marketing specialist Ryan Atkinson, “the current environmental movement has been used as a marketing tool to try and attract new customers.”
Atkinson is President of Harvest Design and Marketing, an Omaha-based company that began in 2007 as a firm dedicated not to green marketing, but rather, to sustainable marketing. So, what’s the difference? According to Atkinson, it’s not merely to attract customers with greenness, but to build a green ethic into a company’s overall marketing strategy. “If they have a sincere desire as a company to reduce their environmental impact, that’s where sustainable marketing as I see it comes into play.”
To learn more, click the link below to listen to the audio file.
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Audio file requires Quicktime Player, free download here.
