Sustainability claims after the ACCC’s greenwashing years

Australian consumer law did not suddenly discover the environment. What changed is the volume of claims and the patience of the ACCC. Across energy, food, fashion, cosmetics, cars and finance, organisations used the language of virtue — green, clean, carbon-neutral, ocean-bound, climate-active, net-zero aligned — as if it were tone of voice. The Commission, and in parallel ASIC in financial marketing, treated it as advertising. That is the correct treatment. A claim on a pack is a representation to a busy person. If the busy person would take it to mean more than you can prove, you have a problem that a brand guideline cannot aestheticise away.

The useful outcome of the greenwashing years is not silence. It is a narrower, more adult way of speaking. Specificity is now a competitive advantage. Fog is a liability. Designers, writers and lawyers have to sit in the same sentence.

The ordinary meaning is the brief

Write every claim as it will be read in an aisle, not as it will be defended in a memo. “Carbon-neutral” means, to most people, that this thing did not add carbon. If you mean “we bought offsets for a subset of scope 1 after a particular date using a standard you have not heard of”, say a shorter true thing or say nothing. “Made with recycled plastic” means, to most people, a lot of the plastic. If you mean 8 per cent of the bottle, excluding the cap and the label, put the number where the adjective was.

Footnotes do not rescue headlines. They never did. After the guidance we have now, they especially do not. If the true version is too long for the pack, the claim does not belong on the pack. It belongs in a report for people who asked.

Imagery is a claim. A pack with a leaf, a glacier, a whale, a First Nations motif used as “nature”, a green that implies an ingredient you do not use — those are representations. Designers who think they are decorating will learn otherwise when the complaint arrives.

Offsets, nets and futures

Future claims — net zero by a date, 100 per cent renewable tomorrow, a transition plan — are still claims. They require a plan that could be believed by a sceptic, not a slide. If the date moves every time a capital project slips, stop putting the date on consumer surfaces. Put it in the report, with the slip.

Offsets are understood, correctly, as a weaker story than not emitting. If you use them, say so in the same breath as the virtue. Do not bury the method. Do not use a playful name for a purchase of someone else’s reduction. Australians have been educated, roughly and publicly, on this point. Do not make them feel conned for having paid attention.

Finance has its own dialect: ESG, aligned, sustainable, impact. ASIC’s work should have ended the habit of naming a fund for a forest it does not closely resemble. If the product is “slightly less bad on a screen of exclusions”, that is an honest product. Call it that, or do not use a mountain.

The system behind the sentence

A sustainability claim is an operational system wearing a headline. Who measures, how often, what is out of scope, what happens when a supplier lies, who can stop a campaign if the number moves. If that system is a consultant’s PDF and a marketing intern, you are not ready to talk.

Put a veto in the room. A person who can kill a pack line without being accused of not being a team player. Give them the ACCC guidance and the last complaint. Their job is to be unfashionable.

Suppliers and certifications are part of the identity. One credible certification, explained, is worth more than a row of logos that look like a Scout sash. If you cannot explain a mark in a sentence, do not print it.

Retail media and the claim that follows the customer home

Supermarket media networks and retailer apps now carry environmental badges next to price. Those badges are your claim in someone else’s interface, often reduced to an icon you did not draw. If you cannot control the reduction, do not supply a virtue that depends on fine print. Give the retailer a sentence that survives a thumbnail, or give them nothing.

Comparisons — “30 per cent less plastic than our old pack”, “lower emissions than the category average” — need a baseline a stranger can find. “Than our old pack” requires a date and a photo of the old pack. “Category average” requires a category someone else would recognise. Without those, the comparison is a feeling.

Industry schemes and recycling logos have trained Australians to look for a number in the chasing arrows. If your number is a wish, omit the mark. A missing mark is honest. A decorative mark is how a brand ends up in a case study it did not want.

What to say instead

Say the material, the percentage, the factory, the take-back that actually exists, the energy contract, the farm, the number of kilometres that are not in the story. Say what you do not do yet. A short “not yet” is more distinctive now than a leaf.

Do not use Country or Indigenous knowledge as a sustainability texture. If there is a real partnership, name the people and the terms. If there is not, leave the desert out of the mood board. That particular greenwash has a second law, and a second ethics, attached.

Staff will be asked about the claim at a barbecue before they are asked in a hearing. Give them a sentence they can say without a slide. If they cannot, the claim does not belong on the van.

The test

Give the pack or the landing page to someone who does not work for you and ask them to tell you, in their words, what you have done for the environment. Write their sentence next to yours. If theirs is larger, you are greenwashing, even if your lawyer is calm. Rewrite until the two sentences match. That match is the brand. It is also the defence. After the last few years, they are the same document.