Ashley Truscott
Senior Manager Global Sustainability
Last week, standing in my local supermarket, I picked up a pack of vegan sausages with a label claiming it was an ‘earth friendly, healthy’ choice.
I felt frustration: turn the package over, and you’ll see a list of ingredients that, if probed into a little more deeply, would tell a different story. And the packaging was all plastic! So, while the food content may have mostly met ‘environmentally friendly’ criteria, other elements of the product did not.
As a communications professional, moments like this drive home how easy it is for well-intentioned messaging to cross the line into greenwashing - whether by accident or design.
This challenge is personal for me. I believe it’s critical to get the language right, accurate, and complete. It’s equally critical to avoid misleading sustainability claims.
I came to a career in a sustainability team not as a technical expert, but as a marketer seeking a new challenge. After leading the marketing department at BDO South Africa for many years, an opportunity arose to join BDO’s global sustainability programme. Initially, my role was to oversee marketing and communications for the programme, but this has transitioned to include operational support for both the internal (net-zero and climate transition journey) and external (building a client services portfolio) programmes.
Being part of this team has opened my eyes to just how interconnected and urgent sustainability issues are. Embarrassingly, I used to think recycling my household waste and managing a compost bin was doing my part. Now, after a few years of working on BDO’s global sustainability programme, learning from expert colleagues, and completing several training courses, I see that surface-level changes aren’t enough.
Ashley Truscott
The complexity is staggering, and this can make it harder to get the messaging right. Take the batteries for electric vehicles, for example: they’re marketed as the green energy alternative, and the race is on to make more and more electric vehicles. But the raw materials for the batteries often come from regions where working conditions are dire. We want clean cars, but we seldom talk about the human cost of making them or the difficult trade-offs involved. It can sometimes seem that for every solution there is a new set of challenges.
So, what does this mean for communicators?
Here’s my takeaway: we have a responsibility to work closely with colleagues across sales, products, services, and legal to ensure that every sustainability claim is fact-checked, meaningful, and clear. It’s easy to stick a green label on a package or a net-zero tagline on a website. It’s much harder to build the internal relationships - and the shared understanding - that make those claims credible and truthful for the consumers of the message. This must be done with a clear eye on the future consequences, intended and unintended, of any of the claims made.
Often, misleading language isn’t born from bad intent. Sometimes, it’s a lack of education, or simply a gap in communication between departments.
But the effect is the same: consumers, clients, and regulators are increasingly savvy, and greenwashing is no longer tolerated. As communicators, we need to ask hard questions internally. Is this claim substantiated? Can we back it up with data? What are we really saying and what is the full context?
We’re at risk of losing sight of these fundamentals, especially when global events, political shifts, and regulatory rollbacks create noise and distraction. But now more than ever, our role as communicators is crucial. We must help our organisations keep their promises - and help our stakeholders see the difference between real progress and empty words. We must also ensure that there are meaningful, simple and understandable measures in place to verify any claims.
If you’re a communications professional in sustainability, my challenge to you is this: don’t work in isolation. Partner with your colleagues to get close to the language being used at every customer touchpoint - and take responsibility for precision, transparency, and honesty.