SOCIAL ISSUES
Just in America, 500 million plastic straws are disposed per day and about three trillion every year are disposed worldwide. If this situation continues, the number of plastics will excess the number of fish in ocean by 2050 according to a report by Swiss non-profit?World Economic Forum. Nowadays, some sort of words like “eco-friendly” and “green” can be found easily in caf ?s and cosmetics stores when walking around the street and shopping. As environmental awareness among the public has risen, more companies are following after Starbucks and offering their own eco-friendly alternatives to plastic products. In this situation, “Green” has become the key of corporate marketing. Starbucks is leading the “green marketing” abandoning all plastic straws and replacing with “adult sippy cup” lids and biodegradable paper straws in case of Frappuccinos. Starbucks estimates this will lead to elimination of more than 1 billion plastic straws globally per year. Now here, if you fail to penetrate the two side of Green business between “Green marketing” and “Greenwashing” however, you may be deceived by the cunning tactics of business marketing. Green marketing is the marketing of environmentally friendly products and services. It is being conducted popularly as more people are concerned with environmental problems and want to contribute to buying products in a way that is more eco-friendly to the earth. Green marketing incorporates a broad range of activities, including eco-friendly production, modification of production process,?sustainable package, as well as environmentally friendly advertisement. Greenwashing, which is a compound word of “green” and “white washing” can be considered as the other side of green marketing. It means to promote as if pursuing the green business even though it is far from actual eco-friendly business. Greenwashing can be defined in 7 categories : concealing the synergistic effect, that is focusing on just few environmental elements of the product, insufficient evidence of “eco-friendly”, ambiguous claim which distorts the product with unrelated facts, false information, and justifying harmful products such as organic
green pesticides. Nowadays as Green market being activated, lots of corporations deceptively promote the perception of environmentally friendly products, aims or policies. In other words, they are falling to Greenwashing, which results in distrust of eco-friendly products and hindrance of the green market growth. As most of Starbucks coffee chains are not located where coffees are cultivated, they are transported thousands of miles. Not only during transportation but also inside the shop, pollution is prevalent. The extensive resources which are transported from far away need to be heated, cooled, powered inside the shop. Wasteful water practices as well as contamination during process were the key point having been criticized by environmentalists. Historically Starbucks have shown us numerous environmental goals. The problem is that these just ended as a “goal.” A goal to reduce energy consumption by 25% only reached 7.1% in 2013 for example. In this point Starbucks can be considered to being greenwashed : concealing the synergistic effect. As it focused on few environmentally friendly elements and concealed the overall environmental influences, Starbucks is being criticized as just showing the image of environmental business leader to the public. As a result, anti-straw movements of Starbucks have possibilities to be greenwashed, used as a simple marketing tool. Large Franchise companies’ green marketing shows huge publicity which influence a number of publics. So if the accuracy and strong appeal are lacked, the damage the company has to overcome is much bigger. From now on, for the true green business, precise understanding of environmental problem and ethical green marketing are needed, not “greenwashing” or “image making”. As Starbucks started leading the Green business, it has to be responsible : should consider the environmental policies. Not only Starbucks but also businesses following its green business should try not to transmute into “Greenwashing”. By Yun Sarang
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DAEIL FOREIGN LANGUAGE HIGH SCHOOL