An inconvenient truth about the public relations industry and greenwashing

2014-03-04It’s no secret that many corporations have a significant amount of power and wealth. Today, corporations have the opportunity to use corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives to help mitigate the world’s most challenging environmental problems, including climate change, waste reduction and the preservation of our natural resources. Communicating about corporate social responsibility is important for a corporation’s many stakeholders and shareholders to understand what a company is trying to accomplish by strategically aligning its business with an environmental challenge it wants to help overcome. Public relations practitioners have the responsibility to market a corporation’s sustainability messages and product claims in an ethical and legitimate manner. ❧ However, the author believes we’re at a crossroads when it comes to environmental CSR and the public relations practice. There’s an imminent danger to the PR industry’s reputation if corporations continue on the path of greenwashing; that is, communicating misleading or false environmental claims. But the author trusts that corporations, with the help of public relations practitioners, can change the corporate greenwashing practices this paper identifies