Greenwashing for Dummies

Two US retailers have decided to ‘boycott’ fuel made from oil extracted from Alberta’s tar sands.

Whole Foods and Bed, Bath & Beyond both claim they will only use ‘clean’ gasoline (whatever that is) for their distribution networks:

WholeFoods‘ trucks travel more than 35 million kilometres annually, delivering organic and natural products to its 284 North American outlets, items such as Manchego cheese from Spain and Himalania-chocolate-covered Goji berries from China. The earthy grocer has now committed to reducing its carbon footprint further by shunning, where possible, Canada’s oil sands producers and the U.S. refiners who market gasoline and diesel made from Alberta’s bitumen, which creates more emissions than conventional, light oil.

The exercise in appearing to be eco-friendly is called Greenwashing. It only requires two things to be effective: customers that are dumber than a bag of hammers, and not getting called on their hypocrisy. Some retailers have gone too green in the past, as Build-a-Bear discovered to its cost last Christmas.

Other retailers have greenwashed before Whole Foods and BBB, including Wal-Mart, Canadian grocer Loblaws, and Ontario’s KGBO.

The inconvenient truth is that neither Whole Foods nor Bed, Bath & Beyond are able to make the boycott work because most fuels are blended from multiple sources, as Virgin Atlantic discovered when it considered a similar move:

… industry experts say that it is extremely difficult for consumers to know the crude source of the diesel that fuels their trucks because refiners mix their feedstocks and swap product with competitors for efficiency reasons. It’s difficult to see the boycott as much more than a publicity stunt, said Alan Knight, a U.K.-based sustainable development consultant who worked with Virgin Airlines when it considered the possibility of refusing to use oil-sands-derived jet fuel.

But this is Greenwashing, why let facts get in the way of marketing to the gullible? If either retailer was really concerned about the future of the planet, they could close up shop and not transport goods from all over the world, but I guess the planet’s not in that much danger after all.

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