How green are your housing communications? Avoiding the greenwash.
In advance of their webinar on the 26th of April, David Lonie, housing sector specialist at print and digital communications business Latcham, discusses greenwashing and how you can avoid it.
The link between print and the environment is a clear and instinctive one – trees come down, paper goes out. Because of this, our organisation, and the print and communications industry as a whole, has had to take a long hard look at how it does business.
Inaction on sustainability risks reputational risk – striving for carbon neutrality is now expected rather than seen as optional. Our clients expect to see us taking action on our carbon footprint, and we expect it from our suppliers.
Because of the importance of being seen to be taking real action on carbon reduction, greenwashing is on the rise.
What is greenwashing?
“Greenwashing” is when an organisation promotes an image of itself as ecologically conscious, whilst not actually doing anything to change their practices. Greenwashing is in some ways worse than simply refusing to take your environmental responsibilities seriously, as an organisation is not telling the truth about its environmental credentials whilst also benefiting from these false credentials.
Sadly, greenwashing is relatively common.
Avoiding greenwashing means honestly appraising and measuring the environmental impact of how your organisation operates, then taking concrete actions to address them. For instance, by measuring the impact of how we do business, we didn’t end up just changing our inks and paper. We completely overhauled our transport fleet, the facility we work in and the options we’re able to present to our clients.
We’ll be discussing more ways you can reduce the impact of your tenant communications in our webinar on the 26th of April – join us then to learn more.
