How can green businesses avoid greenwashing?
Volkswagen make clean diesel engines. Like really clean diesel. Or so they claimed. Their Clean Diesel technology was a key selling feature of some of their most popular vehicles. Then in 2015, it all fell apart when the US Environmental Protection Agency found that real world NOx emissions from their vehicles were forty times higher than in laboratory tests. To make it worse, this was not an accident. Volkswagen had programmed their engine management system to identify when a vehicle was going through an emissions test and modify engine performance to reduce emissions during the testing cycle. This was not only misleading, it was illegal. The deception affected 11 million cars worldwide and became known as the Dieselgate scandal, probably the best known example of corporate greenwashing.
