The Unsuitablog

Quite often, when I’m not dreaming of a different world that reflects my primal longing for wildness and self determination as part of a deeply connected community of like-minded souls, I do feel pleased that I live in the UK. One reason — it’s not a great one compared to the longing dreams, but we are talking about Industrial Civilization here — is that I can call on the services of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Unlike in the USA, for instance, where advertising is sort of regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, in a horribly convoluted and haphazard way, the ASA deals with virtually every form of advertising in much the same way as a well-tuned combine harvester: the grain goes in the hopper, and the unwanted straw is baled up and chucked out the other side – usually with a tart note saying, “Don’t do it again!”

This week alone the ASA, in response to complaints and general looking out for bad stuff, made 11 formal adjudications — these things are pretty thorough — upholding 7 complaints and rejecting 4. Bear in mind that a complaint might be made by a rival advertiser, or for spurious reasons, so these figures are not particularly significant: what is significant, though, are the number of complaints upheld against greenwashing advertisers.

In July, the ASA launched a report, focusing in greenwashing in advertising, which was introduced as follows:

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has today published a report detailing the findings of a stakeholder consultation seminar entitled ‘Environmental Claims in Advertising: Is Green a Grey Area?’. The ASA used the seminar to engage with industry, environmental and consumer groups on establishing where problems arise and setting parameters for environmental and ethical claims.

The June event was held in response to rising concern over what consumers and campaigners see as ‘greenwash’. Claims about CO2 emissions such as carbon ‘neutral’, ‘zero’ or ‘negative’ are particularly open to challenge, as are absolute claims such as ‘100% recycled’ or ‘wholly sustainable’.

The ASA acknowledged that the increased public awareness of environmental issues coupled with fast evolving scientific knowledge and the prolific rise in green initiatives pose a tough challenge for advertisers in ensuring their claims comply with the rules and regulations. A key objective of the consultation event was to give advertisers greater clarity about the current rules on environmental claims to help prevent consumers from being misled or confused, and to gauge stakeholder opinion on the challenges they face.

Now, obviously, the ASA is not anti-advertising per se, it is, after all their raison d’etre (this is like an excerpt from Finnigan’s Wake!), but simply the recognition that advertisers are regularly overstepping the mark is significant in itself. When you look at the adjudications for the last calendar year, using the keyword “environmental”, it gets even more heartening:

Try the search for yourself…

There are some pretty big hitters here: Shell, Lexus, Boeing, British Gas, ExxonMobil…all of whom have been told to change their advertising or not use it again. One example, by Shell advertising the “environmental benefits” of their oil sands abortion includes this damning comment by the adjudicators:

The ASA noted Shell’s argument that they were committed to meeting the world’s energy needs in social, economic and environmentally responsible ways. We understood that oil sands were composed of sand, silt, clay, water and bitumen, which could be upgraded into synthetic crude oil. We also understood that the Canadian oil sands covered over 140,000 square kilometres of Alberta, with each individual mine ranging from 150 to 200 square kilometres, and contained 173 billion barrels of recoverable bitumen. We further understood that the oil sands were either strip-mined from open pits or, where the oil sands were deeper, bitumen was heated so it could flow to a well and be pumped to the surface for in situ extraction.

We noted that a 2006 report by Canada’s National Energy Board, the independent federal agency that regulates Canada’s energy industry, stated that the large scale of the oil sands developments had considerable social and environmental impacts, including those on water conservation, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), land disturbance and waste management. We understood from that report that approved oil sands mining projects were licensed to divert 370 million cubic meters of fresh water per year from the Athabasca River, but that despite some recycling, almost all of the water withdrawn for oil sands operations ended up in waste tailing ponds. We also understood that demand for freshwater for in situ projects was projected to more than double between 2004 and 2015. We noted the report stated that the mining of bitumen and synthetic crude oil from oil sands produced higher GHG emissions than from the production of conventional crude oil, and had been identified as the largest contributor to GHG emissions growth in Canada…

Sheer bureaucratic poetry.

The advert was banned: up yours, Shell! Thanks, ASA!