Calling a Product Eco-Friendly Without Saying Why

A leaf icon and three adjectives

Plenty of product pages describe what they sell as green, natural, eco-friendly or environmentally safe, with a small leaf icon beside the price. Nothing on the page says what any of it means.

Ask the owner and the answer is often vague too. The words came with the supplier's description, or a designer added them because competitors use them.

Customers read those words as a reason to choose one product over another, sometimes at a higher price. That is why the law treats them as claims rather than decoration.

The fix is rarely to stop mentioning the environment. It is to replace each adjective with the fact behind it.

Where the vague words hide

• Product names with eco or green built into them.
• Headlines and badges on product pages, often in green type.
• Leaf, globe and recycling symbols beside products, unexplained.
• Supplier descriptions pasted in word for word.
• Page descriptions and AdWords ads, where a short claim is tempting.
• The about page, describing the whole business as green.

The fourth catches careful owners. Copied text reads, once it is on your page, as your own claim about the product, and you may have no idea what it was based on.

How the law reads a green claim

The Competition Act has no separate rule for environmental claims. It prohibits promotional claims that are false or misleading in any material respect, whatever the subject.

The law weighs the general impression a claim conveys as well as its literal meaning. A leaf, a green banner and the word natural can add up to a claim nobody wrote down.

A claim about performance, such as breaking down within a set time or using less energy, must rest on an adequate and proper test done before the claim is made. Proving it falls to the business.

The Competition Bureau's guidance on environmental claims puts it in practical terms: be specific, be accurate and be able to back it up. This post is general information; a lawyer can advise on a specific claim.

Say the fact instead

Every vague word stands in for something specific. Recycled beats green, and recycled content stated as a share of the product beats both, along with whether it means the product or only its packaging.

A named certification beats a promise, provided the product really is certified, the certification is current, and the page says who certified what.

Some facts need no environmental word at all: made in the province, shipped without a plastic clamshell, repairable with parts you can order.

Recycled, reused and recyclable

Recycled means material was reprocessed from waste into something new. Reused means the item itself had a life before, which is often the stronger story and rarely the one told.

Recyclable depends on where the customer lives. If most of your customers' local programs do not take the material, calling it recyclable without saying so misleads them.

Biodegradable and compostable carry the same trap. Many products only break down in an industrial composting facility, and the honest version says so in the same sentence.

A worked example

A rain barrel maker works from a shop on a rural property, turning used food-grade plastic drums into rain barrels with a spigot, an overflow fitting and a screened lid.

Its website called them eco-friendly rain barrels made entirely from recycled materials, beside a round green badge reading certified green.

None of it was quite right. The drums were reused, not recycled; each had held fruit juice concentrate. The fittings were new. And the badge was the web designer's work, not any certifier's.

Nobody meant to mislead. The words sounded right for the product, and nobody checked them.

The rewritten page says what is true: each barrel is a reused food-grade drum that held juice concentrate, cleaned and fitted in the shop, with a mesh screen to keep out leaves and mosquitoes.

The badge came off, and the supplier's records of what each batch of drums held now sit in a folder with the page's wording.

Badges, seals and symbols

A seal that looks like a certification implies that someone independent examined the product. If nobody did, it makes a claim the business cannot support.

Genuine certifications come with rules on how their mark may be shown, usually on the certified product alone. Keep the certificate and its expiry date on file.

The recycling symbol, a loop of three arrows, reads as a claim too. Use it only with words saying whether it means recycled content or a recyclable item.

True, but beside the point

Some claims are literally true and still mislead. Saying a product is free of a substance its kind of product never contains suggests an advantage over competitors that does not exist.

Natural is the most common example. Plenty of natural substances are harmful, and the word says nothing about how a product was made or what happens to it afterwards.

Comparisons need a baseline. Without saying greener than which product, and measured how, a comparison is an adjective in disguise.

Keep the evidence beside the claim

Make one folder, digital or paper, with an entry for each claim on the site: the wording, the pages it appears on, and the evidence, from specification sheets and certificates to supplier letters and test reports.

Date everything. Suppliers change materials without telling the shops that stock them, so a claim that was true when a product was added may not be true of this year's stock.

When a supplier makes a claim, ask for the evidence in writing before repeating it. If none arrives, leave the claim off.

The counter-case

A firm that makes no environmental claims has nothing to fix, and a shop with hundreds of products can start with the pages that lean on the environment most.

Nor does every description need a laboratory report. A plain, specific fact from the manufacturer's specification sheet is usually support enough for a plain, specific statement.

Some benefits are too involved for one line; a short explanation on its own page beats a slogan on every product. At any size, replace the adjective with the fact and keep the evidence.

This week

1. Search your site for green, natural and eco.
2. List every badge and symbol beside a product.
3. Ask suppliers for evidence behind claims you copied.
4. Replace each adjective with the specific fact.
5. Remove seals nobody independent issued.
6. Start one folder holding the evidence for each claim.
7. Check ads and page descriptions for the same words.

Step three gets skipped most often. A supplier's claim becomes yours the moment it appears on your page, and the time to ask what it rests on is before a customer does.

Vague promises about donations raise the same issue, covered in a portion of sales going to charity, stated vaguely.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.