Spring is a time of renewal when many of us freshen up outward appearances. We turn to new clothes, hairstyles and sunglasses to update our personal looks. And we head to the home improvement store for plants, fertilizer and paint to spruce up our homes and yards. While whitewash is always readily available at the paint counter, greenwash is not – you’re more likely to find it coating environmental debates.
Corporations trying to tell their green business stories are often accused of greenwashing. Photo credit: iStockphoto.
Much more interesting than watching paint dry has been observing public discourse about the environment and what individuals, corporations, governments and other groups are doing – and not doing – to protect it.
For those in the corporate world, there’s no doubt stakeholder expectations about companies’ environmental management have ramped up significantly in recent years. Environmental and social performance are now mainstream factors in assessing the quality of a company.
Oil sands companies are naturally under pressure to be open about their operations and existing and future cumulative impacts on climate change, water quality, air quality and biodiversity. It’s not surprising, then, that the industry is eager to tell our stories. We have seen an out-pouring of corporate sustainability reports and voluntary reporting filings, and also an increased number of advertising and public relations campaigns. Even this OSQAR blog is part of the modern drive to explain and reach out.
Not everybody embraces corporations trying to tell their green business stories. All too often we get accused of greenwashing, a term used by critics to damn businesses who are said to be spending more time and money on talking about the environment than actually doing anything about it, or, in an only slightly less egregious sin, adopting trivial environmental practices merely to promote them in an effort to hide real damage.
While the greenwashing accusation may have been justified in the 1980s when the term was coined, it is much less applicable now. For a start, the pressure to release more information and demonstrate positive environmental and social performance came from governments, regulators and investors, groups not easily fooled by the odd corporate fig leaf.
Even more important, a veritable industry has grown over the last two decades to scrutinize and grade our performance claims and reports, encompassing conservation groups, trade unions, socially responsible investors and indexes like Dow Jones Sustainability Index, FTSE4Good and Canada’s Jantzi Social Index, and corporate social responsibility publications like Corporate Knights.
The fact that Suncor and other oil sands companies are included in all these indexes, and Suncor has been rated as best in class in by some of them, is proof that even in the hard-bitten world of primary resource production, corporate social responsibility has moved light years beyond lip service.
Skepticism about company performance is healthy and should be encouraged, as long as people gather all the facts, consider the alternatives and form their own opinions. We will even continue to paint a picture of our achievements – without, of course, using the colour green.
