This article has been a few months in the making, as we have been quietly reflecting on the new term “greenhushing” which has been a cause of growing concern to many in sustainability circles of late.
In their recent report “Greenwashing Hydra”, Planet Tracker identified the many forms that greenwashing takes, likening it to the many-headed hydra of Greek legend. The analogy is appropriate, because Hercules, sent to destroy the Hydra as one of his twelve labours, found that each time he cut off a head, two grew in its place. To stop new heads regrowing, he cauterised the necks, preventing regrowth. The analogy works because, as Planet Tracker asserts, creativity in using environmental excuses is growing quickly. In addition to the well-known greenwashing/greenlabelling, they identify a myriad of terms.
Greenhushing and other confusing sustainability term explained
- Greenhushing – underreporting or hiding sustainability credentials. Greenhushing is the latest cause for concern in sustainability circles.
- Greencrowding – hiding in a crowd to avoid discovery, for example, joining an environmental group which either moves very slowly or turns out to be a lobbying organisation resisting good environmental policies. They allege that this is true of the Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
- Greenlighting – highlighting green features of a company to draw attention from non-green features (not to be confused with greenlighting in project management, which means giving the go-ahead to a project or a particular project stage after checking it. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority’s case against HSBC’s claims to be helping the environment is cited by Planet Tracker as an example of greenlighting.
- Greenshifting – implying that it’s all the consumers’ fault. “Well,l if you will insist on driving your car, flying long-haul on your holidays, heating your house, living your life like a civilised human being…..” There is of course some truth in this – progress will only be made if both consumers and companies reduce their environmental impact, but the problems can’ all be blamed on consumers. (This is not to be confused with the use of greenshifting in project management, which refers to minimising project problems in order to make a project seem as if it is progressing better than it is).
- Greenrinsing – where a company keeps changing its ESG targets before meeting them (and who will remember what they said last year?).
Why stop there?
But wait – this hydra is supposed to be twelve headed, so we have added six more of our own:
- Greenmoaning – complaining about the difficulty of making serious environmental changes, blaming poor legal frameworks, lack of understanding by the financial community or government, lack of the skilled manpower necessary to change the way the company works, etc. etc.
- Greencrawling – making environmental changes at a deliberately slow snail’s pace.
- Greenpocrisy – claiming to be environmental while doing the opposite. This applies not only to companies but also to consumer, particularly those Western consumers who fly on long-haul holidays or buy lots of products shipped from the Far East.
- Greensonganddancing – executing beautifully choreographed and presented stories about the environment – this is a special version of greenlighting.
- Greenhairshirting – where the CEO or other senior manager constantly writes and speaks about environmental problems, putting his or her personal credibility on the line for changes that may or may not be made by the company in a few years’ time.
- Greenbuying – acquiring green attributes (companies, brands, business partners) without making any changes to core activities.
Confusing now, but not for long
So there we are. Lots of ways of confusing the world from greenhushing to greenlighting and everything inbetween! This confusion is coming to an end, however, as all these behaviours can be identified and tracked using data from thousands of sources, including company reports, analyst briefings, and media reports, analysed using the latest artificial intelligence techniques. That’s what we do, and although we haven’t classified our findings using the above descriptions, because we prefer to keep it simple, behind our findings lie all these types of behaviour. The same approach is applied to the other ESG colour-coded sins – pinkwashing and bluewashing. But that is another story!
