Green Bloggers + Product Reviews. A Toxic Combination?

It's been over a year now since the F.T.C. announced revisions in its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. In short, it required bloggers who review a product to disclose "the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service". That is, if Company X sends a blogger a product in return for a review, the blogger has to disclose that Company X sent them a freebie.

Green bloggers who submit their giveaway listings to Ecobunga! comply with the F.T.C. rule (and if they didn't, we wouldn't post the promotion.)  Typically, a blogger not only reviews the product, they often invite their readers to enter a giveaway in which they too can win the goodie.  Usually entry is by leaving a comment on the post, but also sometimes by liking the blogger's Facebook page, following them on Twitter, etc. 

So far so good.  Except one big problem comprised of three progressively smaller syllables. 

Green-wash-ing.

It's easy to review a product and evaluate whether you like it or whether it "works". It's not so easy to evaluate whether the product is actually green. 

How many bloggers have chemistry labs in their kitchens so they can verify that the ingredients in a cleaner are truly non-toxic or those in a skin care product are truly all-natural?  How many of them have the time or the knowledge to ask companies to supply the certifications for apparel that is claimed to be organic cotton?  From our experience reviewing hundreds of blogger giveaways -- not that many.

And that, dear reader, leads to greenwashing.  Certainly not of the same deliberate sort committed by some companies.  Our experience with green bloggers is that they are uniformly well-intentioned.  They really, really want to let their readers know about new green products and help create a more sustainable world.  It is just that they don't (or don't know how to) vet green claims.  They  rely solely on the information provided to them by the company -- usually the same copy which can be found on the company's website.  And we all know that just because something's on the internets, doesn't make it so.

Now, it may be tempting to pooh-pooh this issue.  After all, most bloggers don't have that many readers -- how much harm is really being done? But when you add all those green bloggers together, collectively there is the potential to spread a lot of mis-information.

Ecobunga! does our part by verifying the green claims of product giveaways submitted to us by bloggers.  If we can't verify through third party certifications and a whole host of other criteria that we list on our FAQ page, we either don't post the giveaway or we write to the blogger and ask them to try to get more information from the company.  Surely we've driven some of them a little nuts with our nit-picking, but when it comes to ensuring that green means green, we'll gladly assume the role of gadfly.