Let’s use our superpower to battle greenwashing
Canadians are notorious complainers. Whether it’s about bad service, insurance companies, used cars or the weather, complaining is what we do. There is even a Government of Canada website called the Complaint Roadmap to walk us through the full spectrum of filing complaints, from phone calls to legal action.
How can we harness our Canadian superpower to do good?
The first step is to learn how the fossil fuel and plastics industries — one and the same, really — have intentionally deceived us about their part in our climate crisis and created an unimaginable global waste problem.
Two very disturbing, yet unsurprising, reports have come out recently from the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE) and the Centre for Climate Integrity.
The reports document the multiple ways these industries have used and still use misleading commercial practices known as greenwashing to deflect responsibility from their business models.
Both “Greenwashing Big Oil and Gas: The Fossil Fuel Deception Playbook” and “Take Action Against Fossil Fuel Greenwashing” handbooks are on the www.cape.ca website.
They tell you what to look out for, and how to file complaints for misleading advertising through Ad Standards and the Competition Bureau.
A few deceptive practices to watch out for:
■ Telling the truth, but not the whole truth, such as promoting a minuscule portion of their business as carbon-neutral when most of it is not;
■ Promoting carbon-offsets showing reduced emissions in one aspect of their business to compensate for emissions elsewhere; and
■ Petro-science fiction where aspirational technologies, such as carbon capture, are “used to secure billions in subsidies from governments for its deadend technologies.”
We should never forget that it was BP that came up with the “carbon footprint” marketing campaign so individuals could cut back while it was businessas-usual for Big Oil.
The Centre for Climate Integrity Plastics Fraud report provides extensive damning evidence about how the industry has known for decades that recycling plastics is an unaffordable fools’ game.
The report will probably make you weep with hopelessness. As far back as 1971, industry thinking was that recycling plastic was “a false economy” but would provide “a valuable second use” if burned as an energy source.
Environmental Defence, as always, is on top of the status quo. The 2023 survey of packaging in grocery stores would put the lie to any claim to a reduction in plastic packaging, finding “nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of the products we audited in four key departments of large grocery stores across Canada were packaged in plastic intended for a single use.”
On Saturday, responsibility for our blue box contents will shift from the regional government to producers. Based on the shameful history of the plastic manufacturers, how will they now deal with their plastic problem?
It looks like anybody and everybody in packaging is part of the Canada Plastics Pact. Their email is info@plasticspact.ca. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, perhaps it’s time to put our Canadian superpower to good use.
SUSAN KOSWAN IS A FREELANCE CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST FOR THE WATERLOO REGION RECORD. REACH HER AT GREYANDSTILLGREEN@GMAIL.COM.