Greenwashing and Misleading Environmental Claims: The Deception of Virtue

Sustainability sells, and that is exactly the problem: when consumers pay more for the planet, the cheapest way to earn the premium is to claim the virtue rather than practise it. Greenwashing is that claim, the false, vague, exaggerated or unsubstantiated representation that a product or business is environmentally friendly, and this note explains what it is, the forms it takes, why ordinary advertising law needed a dedicated answer, and how Indian law now treats it.

1. What Greenwashing Is

Greenwashing is any deceptive or misleading practice concerning the environmental character of goods, services or the business behind them: false claims (the 'biodegradable' bag that is not), vague ones (the 'eco-friendly' badge with no stated basis), exaggerated ones (the marginal improvement sold as transformation), selective ones (one green attribute advertised while the product's real footprint is concealed), and unsubstantiated ones (the claim no test, data or certificate supports). The 2024 Guidelines' definition captures the whole family, deception by concealing, omitting or hiding relevant information, by exaggeration, and by vague, false or unsubstantiated environmental claims, while keeping outside it honest everyday language and obvious hyperbole not amounting to a specific claim: the leaf on the label is not itself a lie; the unsubstantiated 'certified green' is.

2. The Recognisable Forms

• The naked badge: 'green', 'eco-friendly', 'sustainable', 'planet-positive', 'cruelty-free', adjectives doing the work of evidence; the Guidelines permit them only with adequate disclosure and substantiation.
• The hidden trade-off: one attribute advertised (recycled packaging) while the product's dominant impact (energy, chemistry, disposal) is untouched and unmentioned, truthful in the part, misleading in the whole.
• The unscoped claim: 'eco-friendly' without saying what is friendly, the good, the process, the packaging, the usage or the disposal; the same word honestly scoped is information, unscoped it is atmosphere.
• The borrowed or fake certificate: self-created seals styled as third-party certification, lapsed or irrelevant certifications, and 'certified' with no certifier named.
• The baseline trick: comparative claims, '50 per cent greener', against undisclosed, outdated or irrelevant baselines.
• The aspirational cover: 'net-zero by 2040' and similar futures used as present marketing without plans, pathways or interim accountability, tomorrow's promise selling today's product.
• The technical fog: impact jargon, offsets, footprints, life-cycle numbers, deployed on audiences who cannot test it, the opposite of the Guidelines' consumer-friendly-language rule.

3. Why It Needed a Dedicated Answer, and the Legal Frame

Greenwashing was always a misleading advertisement in principle, the false description, the likely deception, the concealment of important information all fit Section 2(28), and an environmental claim a product cannot keep makes it mis-sold under the unfair-practice clauses. But the general law struggled with the green claim's special features: its vagueness (what does 'eco-friendly' assert, exactly?), its information asymmetry (no consumer can audit a supply chain), and its verification problem (the claim's truth lives in data only the maker holds). The answer, in India as in the comparator regimes (the EU's green-claims initiatives, the FTC's Green Guides, advertising-standards codes), is a substantiation-and- disclosure regime: the claim is permitted, but only scoped, explained, evidenced and, where specific, certified, so that vagueness itself becomes the violation. That is precisely the design of the 2024 Greenwashing Guidelines (examined in the next note), which plug into the Act's machinery: the unsubstantiated green claim is enforced as a misleading advertisement and unfair trade practice, CCPA discontinuance, penalties and endorser exposure included, with ASCI's environmental-claims code operating alongside in self-regulation. For consumers and competitors alike, the practical test is three questions: what exactly is claimed; for which part of the product's life; and on what evidence, an advertisement that cannot answer them is greenwashing by the regime's own measure.

4. Related Topics and Provisions

• The Greenwashing Guidelines, 2024 (Topic 84): the regime in detail
• Misleading advertisement under Section 2(28) (Topic 19): the parent wrong
• The 2022 Guidelines (Topic 72): the general advertising code alongside
• Emerging CCPA guidelines (Topic 82): the field in one place