Helene York

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to cut through the growing clutter of ‘green marketing’ and choose independently verified environmentally preferred products simply by comparing labels?

Certainly that’s the promise of eco-labels, from USDA Organic to Marine Stewardship Council-certified and a myriad of others. Those of us engaged in supply-chain analysis know the limitations of labels too well, but we tend to support these indicators anyway. Our customers expect them and they’re the best we’ve got right now. 

Or are they? New evidence may be suggesting otherwise.

The case for labels: When developed by third parties with significant input from thoughtful advisors, ‘eco-labels’ provide a certain hedge against spurious claims of environmental or social responsibility. There isn’t a farming operation anymore that doesn’t claim to be practicing ‘sustainable’ agriculture, or in the case of fish farming, aquaculture. Only independent evaluation against transparent high standards provides a basis for reliable claims. In the field of nutrition, where government agencies have the last word on labels, packaged goods manufacturers boldly and creatively assert numerous health claims. Unfortunately, only the factoids (e.g. grams of fiber or number of calories) are verifiable; subjective claims of ‘natural’ and ‘healthy’ are unreliable at best.

Without eco-labels, many argue, unsubstantiated marketing taglines would fill the void. A November 2007 study of 1,108 consumer products found all but one committed at least one of Scott Case’s notorious “Six Sins of Greenwashing: the Sin of No Proof, Vagueness, Irrelevance, Fibbing, Lesser of Two Evils, and the Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off. The last sin was defined as “suggesting a product is ‘green’ based on a single environmental attribute or an unreasonably narrow set of attributes without attention to other important issues.” No fewer than 57 percent of products reviewed had committed this sin. A company marketing farmed Asian shrimp commits this sin when it proclaims “lower energy used” in entrée preparation while ignoring that the shrimp is grown using poor environmental practices. But a credible eco-label (even if it existed for farmed shrimp) couldn’t address this problem by itself.