Greenhushing: Why It’s on the Rise and How to End it

As society moves toward a more conscious and sustainable way of life, consumers are increasingly opting for products that are less harmful to the environment. Making informed purchasing decisions, however, can be challenging—especially with greenwashing and the increasingly prominent trend, greenhushing, on the rise.

When most of what consumers know about a product comes from the hang tag or other product displays, how much do they really know? How much of this information is helpful? And how much of this information can be confusing or even misleading?

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By using buzzwords like "green", "eco-friendly" or "sustainable", companies attract consumers that believe the products they purchase are good for the planet. The problem with these claims lies in the lack of data-based backing. These vague claims of "eco-friendliness" are made without substantiated data, which can be considered greenwashing.

In fact, in 2020, the European Commission launched an exhaustive study related to sustainability claims, which showed that 53 percent of claims provide vague and misleading information about the products’ environmental characteristics. Of these claims, 40 percent could not be substantiated.

Moreover, 230 sustainability labels and 100 green energy labels were identified, and half offer weak or non-existent verification. Findings like these have triggered heightened enforcement among consumer authorities and other institutions, signaling the need for new legislation to curb greenwashing.

Adding insult to injury, various greenwashing lawsuits made headlines in the fashion industry last year. Several major brands were sued and/or publicly scrutinized by consumer authorities or groups for misleading claims.

In the past year, we saw the removal of H&M's Conscious label and Zara's Join Life label. Similarly, Asos removed its Responsible Edit range and filter from its website, while the Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) decided to pause its consumer-facing transparency program after the Norwegian consumer authority found it to be ‘misleading’ consumers.

In a popular trend, an increasing number of fashion brands are choosing to disclose less about their sustainability efforts and attributes of their products in a new phenomenon called greenhushing. A 2022 report by the South Pole—a company that develops comprehensive emission reduction projects and strategies—details three potential reasons behind this shift: fear of failure, fear of scrutiny and fear of litigation.

While it makes sense for the industry to tone down and avoid misleading or generic claims, silence is not the answer as it can skew progress toward a collective sustainable fashion culture. In fact, less public-facing communication limits knowledge-sharing to industry peers and consumers—which could result in missed opportunities for collaboration and engagement. It could also give the impression that sustainability leaders are failing to lead.

This is concerning, and we need those making headway on sustainability targets to inspire others to help shift mindsets and behaviors. The industry needs to establish clear rules regarding making ethical sustainability claims so consumers (and industry peers) can be informed, not misled.

In Europe, new regulation is being drawn up to protect consumers from greenwashing. One of the pillars of the European Union's (EU) Strategy for Sustainable and Circular Textiles is promoting consumer-facing transparency. Within this context the EU Council on March 22 launched the proposal for a Directive on Substantiating Green Claims to tackle greenwashing by ensuring the accuracy of companies’ green claims.

According to the proposal, when companies choose to make a green claim about their products or services, they must respect minimum norms on how they substantiate and communicate these claims. Claims will need to be independently verified and proven with scientific evidence—adopting a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach—and if products are compared with others, these comparisons must be fair.

Claims or labels that use aggregate scoring of the product's overall environmental impact will not be permitted and—to avoid the proliferation of environmental labeling schemes—new private schemes are only allowed if they can show higher environmental ambition than existing ones. The final legislation is expected to launch in 2024.

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will soon launch the last update of its Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims to help businesses avoid misleading claims. Now, FTC is soliciting public comment on the update, and the American Association for Footwear and Apparel (AAFA) has suggested allowing qualified environmentally sustainable product-level claims if two conditions are met. The first is if the claim does not imply the product or product components are wholly environmentally sustainable. The second is if a statement immediately precedes or follows the environmentally sustainable claim that includes specific information about the environmental impact(s) that underlie the sustainable claim.

To communicate sustainable improvements, the information provided to consumers must be truthful (clear and relevant), transparent (proven with scientific evidence) and backed by a robust, third-party verified system.

Achieving this, however, is not without its challenges. The first challenge is deciding how these concepts can be further defined and deciding what the new regulation will consider acceptable. Ideally, we would have primary, third-party verified and comparable data (collected and analyzed according to the same methodology) from every step and process in a product's supply chain, including the use phase and end-of-life. This information could then be compiled and tallied to reflect the product's total impact. Additionally, it could be used to make accurate comparisons between products.

The problem? Carrying out an LCA is still a costly and time-consuming process not all supply chain actors can make. For this reason, the industry's access to primary data from its supply chain is limited and mainly relies on secondary data and averages from databases that don't always accurately reflect the impact of that specific product. To top it off, not all sustainability parameters are currently covered under the LCA method, including recyclability, biodiversity and microfiber shedding.

In the end, crafting an accurate, substantiated and comprehensible claim is no easy feat, and is wrought with challenges like limited data availability and data quality. There are potential challenges on the consumer side as well. Businesses and industry leaders must ask themselves: will consumers even understand and process all this complex information when buying products?

Despite the challenges, there is an industry-wide effort to effectively tackle greenwashing. There is ample room for improvement. Textile and fashion industry players like Recover™, a leading mechanical textile recycler, welcome clear and pragmatic regulations to produce more sustainable products and ethically share this progress.

Recover's communications and claims, for example, are created based on third-party verified LCA studies performed according to PEF methodology. Recover™ provides guidelines and support to customers and brand partners on how to accurately craft consumer-facing communications about Recover's recycled cotton.

To make this sustainable data user-friendly, Recover™ highlights impact savings in relatable terms like the number of showers or wash cycles. Given the limited space to communicate these savings (hang tags, for example, can usually only include one or two short claims), Recover™ includes QR codes that redirect consumers to a webpage with more information about the savings and the LCA behind them. These small steps, collectively, can make a huge difference and help increase transparency and combat greenhushing.

This article was written by Helene Smits, chief sustainability officer, Recover™.

To learn more about Recover™,click here.

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