The paper explores the influence of greenwash on green trust and discusses the mediation roles of green consumer confusion and green perceived risk. The research object of this study focuses on Taiwanese consumers who have the purchase experience of information and electronics products in Taiwan. This research employs an empirical study by means of the structural equation modeling. The results show that greenwash is negatively related to green trust. Therefore, this study suggests that companies must reduce their greenwash behaviors to (...) enhance their consumers’ green trust. In addition, this study finds out that green consumer confusion and green perceived risk mediate the negative relationship between greenwash and green trust. The results also demonstrate that greenwash is positively associated with green consumer confusion and green perceived risk which would negatively affect green trust. It means that greenwash does not only negatively affect green trust directly but also negatively influence it via green consumer confusion and green perceived risk indirectly. Hence, if companies would like to reduce the negative relationship between greenwash and green trust, they need to decrease their consumers’ green consumer confusion and green perceived risk. (shrink)

Trong những năm gần đây, khái niệm phát triển bền vững đã trở nên phổ biến trong các ngành công nghiệp trên khắp thế giới. Người tiêu dùng ngày càng tỏ ra quan tâm đến tác động môi trường tạo ra từ các lựa chọn của họ, điều này đã thúc đẩy các công ty phải sử dụng các thông điệp và biện pháp thân thiện với môi trường. Mặc dù những nỗ lực thực sự hướng đến sự bền vững (...) là đáng khen ngợi, nhưng đã xuất hiện một xu hướng đáng báo động: hiện tượng "tẩy xanh" (greenwashing). Trong các hoạt động tẩy xanh này, các công ty thường phóng đại hoặc trình bày sai những nỗ lực về môi trường của họ để thu hút những người tiêu dùng có ý thức về môi trường. Vụ bê bối "Diesel sạch" của Volkswagen vào năm 2015 đã chỉ ra hiện hiện tượng tẩy xanh đáng báo động trong các doanh nghiệp. Tình trạng này đã lan rộng sang nhiều lĩnh vực khác nhau, bao gồm cả ngành đồ uống và thời trang nhanh. (shrink)

Greenwashing—the practice of companies exaggerating or fabricating their environmental credentials—undermines public trust and impedes genuine sustainability progress. In the context of China’s transition toward greener development, addressing this issue is crucial. A recent study by Ding, Wang, and Wu (2025) evaluates the impact of China’s 2018 Environmental Tax Law (ETL) on curbing greenwashing while also examining how digitalization across corporate, societal, and governmental domains moderates this effect.

The ASA’s criticism serves as a reminder that organizations must align their actions with their environmental claims to contribute to environmental betterment genuinely. Otherwise, that will not be a pursuit of eco-surplus culture but a greenwashing culture that keeps distancing the business sector from achieving the environmental semiconducting principle.

In this study we examine how different organizations communicate their commitments to sustainability and corporate social responsibility on their websites, and the different ways stakeholders could interpret this communication. We do this by examining several case studies and reflecting on those cases with the help of a theoretical framework. Our main findings are that there is a growing concern amongst stakeholders regarding environmental values and that unsubstantiated sustainability claims issued in corporate publicity can be interpreted as greenwashing. We identify (...) a conflict between goals of growth versus environmental sustainability in some of the cases. We also discover that organizations appear to be more transparent with their intentions by communicating their environmental values based on firm-serving motives rather than public-serving ones. (shrink)

Tourism is one of the socio-economic trends that significantly contributes to the shift of the planetary system into the Anthropocene regime. At the same time, it is also a socio-cultural practice characteristic of the imperial mode of living, or consumerism. Thus, it is a form of commodification of nature, also a way of deepening social inequalities between a privileged minority of the global population and an exploited majority providing services to those whose socio-economic status allows them to travel for fun (...) and commoditised “experience”. This is not an inevitable activity, an activity in which environmental costs (carbon footprint, water footprint, energy consumption, and waste production) are necessary to ensure the basic resources of life. Tourism is therefore a form of luxury consumption. For any tourism model to be, not only, environmentally sustainable but also socially just, or at least acceptable, it would have to be accessible to all people. Ecotourism should also have to meet the criterion of a solidarity mode of living referred to as sufficiency. This is hardly conceivable in the climatic, demographic, and political regime of the Anthropocene. The latter is likely to be characterized by, among other things, mass migration of climate or environmental refugees on the one hand and climate apartheid of the states of the global North on the other. Ecotourism, accessible to an even smaller proportion of the world`s population than the current mass tourism, will thus be more likely to accentuate the social and environmental inequalities of which it is already a significant manifestation. Therefore, the question is whether the concept of ecotourism is not just another manifestation of greenwashing, i.e. an attempt to legitimize economic, social, and cultural activities that devastate the social and environmental environment. (shrink)

The chapter addresses the problem of the socio-ecological transformation of industrialized societies determined by the ideology of growth. It points out that the knowledge of the impossibility of sustainable growth on a planet with finite resources has been available at least since the 1960s. However, economic policies, as well as organizational principles and imperatives of public and private institutions, have so far been formulated regarding the growth imperative. However, the concepts of the Anthropocene and Planetary boundaries formulated within the framework (...) of Earth System Sciences already precisely confirm the devastation of the planetary system on a scale that threatens the survival of civilization in its current geographical scope and complexity. Socio-ecological transformation thus appears as a necessary prerequisite for preserving the environmental conditions for the existence of organized human society. The concept of de-growth provides a theoretical basis for establishing societal boundaries, i.e. the total rate of resource consumption and the amount of waste and emissions that a society can produce to prevent planetary boundaries from being exceeded. However, as long as public policies continue to be subordinated to the imperative of growth and fictions about unlimited resources or the infinite capacity of the planetary system to absorb all forms of pollution, all so-called green policies or transformations will remain just rhetorical exercises, but more or less sophisticated forms of greenwashing. (shrink)

Dựa trên dữ liệu từ 1.275 công ty niêm yết trong giai đoạn 2015–2021, nhóm nghiên cứu đã định lượng hành vi tẩy xanh bằng cách so sánh điểm số ESG công bố với hiệu suất môi trường thực tế của các doanh nghiệp.

This provocation critiques the notion of long-term thinking and the claims of its proponents that it will help address failures in dominant conceptions of time, particularly in regard to environmental crises. Drawing on analyses of the Clock of the Long Now and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, the article suggests that we be more wary of the concept’s use in what we might call chronowashing. Like the more familiar greenwashing, where environmental issues are hidden by claims (...) to be addressing the problem, the article explores how these examples of long-term thinking distract from extractivism, racism, and environmental injustice, making it harder to address the complexities involved. In particular, the article discusses examples where long-term thinking provides a veneer of environmental concern that actually disconnects from the work of building more equitable forms of relation. As a contrast, the article’s author asks: What is lost when we diagnose a problem as arising due to short-term thinking and propose long-term thinking as the solution? Against chronowashed environmental time, the author argues for more complex approaches that explicitly take into account the temporalities of inequality, political organization, ethical responsibilities and much else. The article engages with approaches to time that foreground the work needed to create time and move ethically within it, including Charles W. Mills’s white time and Kyle Powys Whyte’s kinship time. The author suggests that a stronger emphasis on the temporality of community, solidarity, and coalition—versus what James Hatley and Deborah Bird Rose have described as temporal narcissism—can better foreground the kinds of work that needs to be done, particularly by those with privilege. (shrink)

Governments or international organizations set limits on the amount of emissions that a company or country can release. If a company exceeds this limit, it must purchase carbon credits from others who have reduced emissions below the allowed levels. -/- Carbon credits were initially created to encourage countries and businesses to reduce emissions through a market mechanism. Each credit represents one ton of CO2 or an equivalent greenhouse gas that is not emitted into the atmosphere. This mechanism has created a (...) new financial market where companies can trade the right to emit, generating immediate profit. It is expected to not only provide short-term economic benefits but also incentivize investment in green technology, raising environmental awareness and supporting sustainable initiatives. -/- However, a deeper analysis reveals significant concerns about the real effectiveness of commodifying nature and the potential for negative consequences. Companies can manipulate the credit system to “greenwash” their image without a genuine commitment to emission reductions. Imagine a corporation that pollutes and severely impacts the environment but has enough financial resources to purchase the necessary carbon credits. In this case, nature becomes a business tool, stripped of its intrinsic value. (shrink)

A recent report revealed a staggering 61% drop in the market value of carbon offsets, attributed to adverse findings from both the scientific community and the media. These findings have raised concerns about the effectiveness of carbon credit projects, leading investors to reduce their involvement or withdraw completely, thereby substantially decreasing the market’s overall value [1,2]. This reluctance among buyers is fueled by escalating skepticism about the actual environmental impact of these projects and concerns over potential “greenwashing,” where companies (...) misleadingly present their environmental practices as more eco-friendly than they are. (shrink)

This book is an edited collection of original research papers on the digital revolution of the public and governance. It covers cyber governance in Finland, and the securitization of cyber security in Finland. It investigates the cases of Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump, the 2017 presidential election of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Brexit. It examines the environmental concerns of climate change and greenwashing, and the impact of digital communication giving rise to the #MeToo and Incel movements. (...) It considers how digitilization can serve to emancipate women through ride-sharing, and how it leads to the question of robot rights. It considers fake news and algorithmic governance with respect to case studies of the Chinese social credit system, the US FICO credit score, along with Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica and the European effort to regulate and protect data usage. (shrink)

Can new words help combat climate change? A recent study by Zella et al. (2025) suggests that the strategic creation of new words—neologisms—may play a surprisingly powerful role in accelerating climate action. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, ecolinguistics, and environmental psychology, the authors argue that terms such as flight shame and greenwashing are far more than passing linguistic trends. These expressions influence how individuals perceive, feel about, and respond to environmental challenges, potentially driving collective shifts toward more sustainable (...) behaviors and triggering social tipping points that lead to systemic transformation. (shrink)

The ecosocialists have broad agreements about the radical political economic changes that are called for, and have largely rejected the mysanthropic and anti-technological views of some radical ecologists. But the ecosocialists differ on what role nuclear power and emerging technologies should play under a Green New Deal. The ecomodernists broadly agree on the importance of nuclear and emerging technologies, but their impact has been muted by their association with corporate “greenwashing” and neoliberal technofix apologias for free markets and boy (...) geniuses. As in other policy domains the technoprogressive perspective represents a unique stance at the intersection of these two trends. (shrink)

Mặc dù những nỗ lực thực sự hướng đến sự bền vững là đáng khen ngợi, nhưng đã xuất hiện một xu hướng đáng báo động: hiện tượng "tẩy xanh" (greenwashing).

Accusations of hypocrisy are a recurring theme in the public debate on climate change, but their significance remains poorly understood. Different motivations are associated with this accusation, which is leveled by proponents and opponents of climate action. In this article, I undertake a systematic assessment of climate hypocrisy, with a focus on lifestyle and political hypocrisy. I contextualize the corresponding accusation, introduce criteria for the conceptual analysis of climate hypocrisy, and develop an evaluative framework that allows us to determine its (...) moral significance. I argue that different instances of climate hypocrisy are problematic to different degrees, depending on how detrimental they are to an agent's attainment of environmental integrity. The resulting framework helps clear the confusion caused by disinformation campaigners, by distinguishing objectionable uses of the climate hypocrisy charge from constructive ones motivated by genuine concern for integrity. (shrink)

Abstract The climate crisis cannot be solved through guilt rituals, carbon offsets, or performative sustainability campaigns. This paper offers a structural analysis of why mainstream “green” approaches—carbon markets, ESG ratings, net-zero claims—fail to resolve ecological collapse. Drawing from the CODES framework (Chirality of Dynamic Emergent Systems), we reframe environmental damage not as risk to manage, but as signal of coherence loss. Each failed paradigm is dissected, and each replaced with a phase-coherent alternative. The paper is intended for both everyday citizens (...) and institutional actors—those tired of doing “the right thing” and still watching everything burn. (shrink)