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American ecologist Jay Westerveld tells Rare Earth how he came up with the word "greenwashing" after a surf trip to Fiji in 1983. As a budget traveller, he says he had been staying in a brothel to save cash, but it was so grim that he decided to borrow some towels from a plush hotel nearby.

Westerveld was struck by the hypocrisy of a sign in one of the rooms asking guests to help the environment by reusing their towels, when he knew that the hotel – which was owned by “a really deep-pocketed corporation” – was destroying a coral reef to expand its bungalows. “What I was most upset by was just that they felt that somehow recycling or conserving water would offset direct ecological, ecosystemic damage to these beautiful, fragile coral reefs,” he recalls.

He later wrote an essay on ecological conservation entitled "Wash my towels, don’t greenwash me", and the term "greenwashing" was born. It’s since been widely used to call out companies for making false or misleading claims about their eco credentials.

2. …this has now given rise to "greenhushing" and even "green bleaching"

With a raft of new environmental regulations, increasing scrutiny from activists and the media, and a growing backlash against climate action, some companies are deciding it’s wiser to stay silent entirely. In a neat linguistic twist, this approach has been coined "greenhushing".

Westerveld explains his view of the difference between the two: “To me, greenhushing just avoids anybody having to answer for anything at all. If someone's greenwashing, someone might point a finger at them and say, ‘Hey, that's not really honest, what you're doing.'" But in the case of greenhushing… “they're sort of divesting themselves of all responsibility. I think that's more dangerous than greenwashing.”

Some corporations even appear to be taking things one step further and resorting to "green bleaching". Helen explains: “It's not just that companies stay quiet about what they're doing; they actively remove it from reports and from material describing their activities.”

It’s clear why many corporations may be wary of criticism: one EU study found that “more than half of environmental claims made about products and services are vague, misleading, or unfounded”, according to a Â鶹ԼÅÄ News report. And the consequences could soon be bigger than bad PR: with new anti-greenwashing laws coming in, the sustainability platform Compare Ethics has warned that 40% of large UK firms could be at risk of fines.

Helen explains that consumer watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority is stepping up its scrutiny too, “investigating green slogans and images found on food, cleaning products and toiletries in the UK.” At the same time, Europe and the UK are seeing more legal action, such as a recent case in the Netherlands that saw airline KLM’s advertising on greenhouse gas emissions ruled as misleading.

4. Fear is stifling publicity around successful green initiatives

Ex-journalist and PR advisor Piers Schofield says organisatons are “afraid of being called out, whether that's by journalists or activists. They need to get everything absolutely right and they're afraid if they put a foot wrong, that will do them reputational damage.”

As a result, he says, some companies decide not to promote the sustainable things they are doing, in case they’re criticised about areas where they’re falling short. Piers gives an example: “one of our clients is deploying some really good climate tech to a place in the UK… It's a great thing to talk about, but the institution itself doesn't want to talk about it, because they've been accused of greenwashing in the past through other stuff they do.”

Instead of presenting itself as a leader in the field – and inspiring others to invest in the same green technology – the company has stayed silent. Piers explains that they’re “nervous about taking the time and the effort to deal with all that negative incoming flack, when they could just sit and be a little bit quieter.”

Emmanuel Faber, Chair of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), thinks the new standards his organisation is introducing – which outline a range of data companies must publish about their environmental performance – could solve the problem. The idea is to create a robust and transparent system for assessing companies’ sustainability and impact on the climate that works in a similar way to financial accounting.

“The day you have disclosures at a market level, like accounting, that day there is no greenhushing anymore, then no greenwashing anymore,” he says. And these standards are now coming into force around the world. “We already have countries that have committed to adopt those disclosures that account for more than half of the global GDP and half of the global greenhouse gas emissions.”

But Helen cautions that it may not be that simple: “The accounting systems are going to evolve because the science and the knowledge of these systems, and the understanding of the impact, is going to evolve. So, I don't think it's going to be [that] there’s one accounting system to rule them all… and then it's all going to be easy. I can't see that ever happening.”

6. Industry-wide change takes time, money – and shouting about it

Emmanuel Faber says, “Companies can build long-term resilience with climate actions if they do them properly, that also builds competitive advantage.” And, if they go public with what they’re doing, others will want to copy them.

He says that, while he was CEO of French food giant Danone, the company led the way in investing in sustainable farming methods. “We started regenerative agriculture 15 years ago, and now all large multinational food companies are not only speaking about, but also implementing, regenerative agriculture.”

Solutionist Solitaire Townsend says companies need to stand up for sustainability and give shoppers the data to make good decisions, while ending “big ego marketing campaigns” that exploit green claims for publicity.

“We really need transparency from companies… We need to know whether if we flush this shampoo, is it going to harm the environment? We need to know whether things are recyclable. We need a lot of information to be able to make the choices that we want to make,” she says. “We also need brands to actually stand up for the fact that being green is good for business."