Key Indicators of Greenwashing | The Sensible Fay | Sustainable Fashion

We’re just wrapping up another Fashion Revolution Week in remembrance of the Rana Plaza collapse of 2013. If you’re unfamiliar with the event, The Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, which housed a number of garment factories and employed around 5,000 people, collapsed on April 24, 2013.

The disaster killed 1,134 people and injured more than 2,500 others.

This industrial catastrophe is one of the keystone events that brought conventional fashion under harsh criticism for its unfair labor practices and damaging environmental impacts. Since then, activists have taken to the streets (albeit not literally this year) to protest fast fashion.

Fashion Revolution Week (and Earth Week, along that same vein) holds space for a lot of important conversations surrounding sustainability, equality, and transparency, but because of all the media it garners, it’s also become a prime opportunity for businesses to launch their greenwashed campaigns.

To shed some light on greenwashing techniques that these brands might be implementing, I’ve written a fun letter to them. As a consumer, I hope that you’ll enjoy this change of pace from my typical blog posts and consider it as a guideline for some key indicators of greenwashing/a guideline to tell whether or not a brand is truly sustainable.

Dear fast fashion brands…

Your brand is not sustainable if there’s no evidence of it. WE NEED RECEIPTS! I REPEAT, WE NEED RECEIPTS!

If you’re going to claim to have sustainability at the forefront of your business’s design, then you need to provide the transparent reports to back it up. You cannot simply CLAIM to be doing good without actually backing up your actions.

Brands that are truly sustainable and ethical have their reports and factories clearly displayed and consistently updated.

Your excessive use of green will not cut it!

We see right through your branding bullsh*t. A lot of companies have taken to using the color green and minimalistic design as a means to subconsciously influence their audience into believing that their products are better for the environment. We’re smarter than that. We know that they’re not.

Again, if you’re truly passionate about sustainability, show us the action steps that you’ve taken to ensure that your production is environmentally optimized.

Going off of that, please stop using stock photos of wild animals and forests to give people the impression that you’re a sustainable brand. It’s incredibly misleading.

Just because you’re at the top of the class in sustainability within your industry, does not mean that your business actually implements sustainable practices.

Maybe you’re the industry leader in a massively polluting industry like fossil fuels...if your entire industry is filthy and unjust, then what good does it do if you’re marginally better than all the rest?**note on this later

You need to stop using false labels and making broad claims! 🤬

This one is very similar to the use of green. A lot of brands have taken to creating their own logos that actually mean nothing so that they can trick consumers into thinking that their products are certified to be better for the environment. PLEASE STOP DOING THIS! I honestly wish there were a penalty for this or a better restriction on what people could use for marketing.

WHY YOU ALWAYS LYING?

This is the meme that I’m referencing. 😂

There are some brands that will straight-up fabricate statements and data about their companies that aren’t supported because they know that the majority of consumers are not going to take the time to actually do their research.

What are some other greenwashing techniques that you have seen utilized by brands? The more we openly talk about them, the easier it gets for us to recognize and protest against them. What are some of the most outlandish greenwashing campaigns that you have seen?

**note: I have mixed feelings on large brands, like H&M, being touted as “sustainable.” On one hand, they’re actually doing pretty well in terms of following their plan to be sustainable by 2030 but that statement in itself demonstrates that they’re not actually a sustainable brand yet.

Large corporations have a more difficult time implementing sustainable changes because their supply chain is so massive and there are many more components to coordinate. I also think that they’re a really important part of the equation in making sustainable practices more mainstream because if one corporation can demonstrate that sustainable changes are possible, then their competitors will be forced to do the same. Thoughts on this?