Consumers are increasingly considering the environmental impact of a product when making purchasing decisions, and marketers know it.
But exactly how environmentally friendly are the goods you are buying? And how true are the big "green" claims advertisers are making in online ads?
The ads might say a product is "sustainable" or "green" or "environmentally friendly". Or they might feature emojis like ♻ or 🌿.
Perhaps the advertising is dominated by a delightfully earthy colour palette that gives off "environmental" vibes.
But what does a recycling emoji, or a word like "sustainable" mean in the context of an ad? A lot of the time, nothing at all.
An audit of advertising claims using a huge dataset of Facebook ad observations reveals the common tropes advertisers will use to convince you of their green credentials.
Researchers have combed through ads contributed by Facebook users to the Australian Ad Observatory project, run by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. The ABC is a partner in the project.
All up, they found thousands of ads for commercial products that make environmental claims, that were viewed around 20,000 times.
The energy sector, along with ads for household products, fashion, health, and personal care dominated the dataset.
ABC News is not suggesting any particular ad is misleading or deceptive. But the combined dataset reveals the claims that crop up most commonly — and how advertisers can slip between the cracks of advertising rules to give their products a green vibe, without ever having to justify it.
"Overall, it was clear that most ads are vague, unhelpful, and really unclear," says Chandni Gupta, the deputy chief executive of the Consumer Policy Research Centre.
"It's really hard to put two products side by side that have used the same green claims and be confident that they're offering the same thing."
Green, clean, sustainable: an inscrutable trifecta
Lead researcher Professor Christine Parker says the dataset analysis revealed the three most common words companies use in making claims were "clean", "green", and "sustainable".
"They don't necessarily mean anything," she says. "In some cases, if you went to the company's website and dug into it, you might find information about what these terms mean."
"But we think that's too much of a burden on the consumer."
Visual imagery of nature and the ocean, including green, blue, and beige colour palettes, were commonly used.
Emojis were also frequently used to help give advertising a "green" vibe, with leaves, the earth and the sun among the most used.
Another common emoji was the "Mobius loop" symbol ♻, widely recognised as a symbol for recycling.
Sometimes advertisers use it to refer to genuinely recyclable products, but there are also many examples of it being used without explanation.
There are national guidelines for the use of the symbol in on-package labelling, but the use of the emoji in advertising falls outside those rules.
"There is a mix of the terms, the imagery, colours, and even emojis that, when you put them all together, they create a real green halo effect," says Chandni Gupta. "It can give the impression that something might be more environmentally friendly than it actually is."
A 'green halo'
Sometimes companies will make claims in advertising that are true. But the way they are presented might lead customers to think the claim is more significant than it is.
For example, the researchers found advertisements from beauty retailer MECCA that promoted "sustainable packaging" alongside images of their products.
But when they dug into the claim, they say, they discovered that the "sustainable packaging" was the material used to ship the product to a customer, rather than anything relating to the actual product itself.
ABC News has contacted MECCA for comment.
Sustainable could mean only part of a product is recycled, or that it is made from recycled products, but not recyclable, Gupta says. "It could mean that the product packaging is recyclable, but not the product itself. It could even mean that just the shipping box it arrives in is recyclable."
Are these ads misleading or deceptive?
Australian law prohibits businesses from misleading consumers, and while Professor Christine Parker says it's likely some people are being tricked by ads with vague green claims, their vagueness makes it very difficult to prosecute.
"Often products with a green claim will be sold at a higher price point," she says – meaning consumers may be paying more for something that isn't really what it claims to be.
Regulators including the ACCC are now taking a greater interest in environmental claims, and a "sweep" of advertisers conducted earlier this year uncovered several cases it has been investigating.
"We know that consumers are conscious of their environmental impact and are seeking to make choices that minimise impact on the environment," ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe says.
"We did find in the online sweep that whilst these sorts of claims were widespread, there were particular sectors where we saw more concerning claims and some examples of those are cosmetics, food packaging, and retailing and household products."
This week yoghurt company MOO agreed to a court-enforceable undertaking to change misleading language on its packaging.
The ACCC found that for at least two years, MOO had been claiming its tubs were made from "100% ocean plastic", when the plastic resin used to make the packaging was actually collected from coastal areas in Malaysia, rather than the ocean itself.
MOO admitted the packaging was likely in breach of Australia's consumer law, and has now changed its label, referring to the packaging as "ocean bound" plastic.
The law is 'the wrong way around'
The ACCC earlier this year published draft guidelines for advertisers making green claims, which are expected to be finalised before the end of the year.
"The Australian Consumer Law is very helpful in relation to green claims in so far as it does prohibit conduct that's likely to mislead or deceive consumers," Commissioner Lowe says. "But … there can be a gap between something that is vague and confusing, and that is misleading to the legal standard."
She said the green claims issue had been a compliance and enforcement priority since July, and the ACCC had a number of active investigations underway.
"Now that we have outlined to the community what our expectations are, we're providing clarity and we expect businesses to do their part in taking up those guidelines and making sure that the claims they are making are clear and that they can be substantiated."
Professor Christine Parker says regulators are limited in what they can do because the law is the "wrong way around".
"At the moment our tool for addressing greenwashing is the prohibition on misleading and deceptive conduct," Parker says. "You have to wait for a business to make a misleading claim, someone has to complain about it, somebody has to investigate it … and prove that they made a specific representation that was false or misleading."
What government should be doing, she says, "is requiring that before businesses make a claim, those claims are defined and there is evidence behind those claims".
Consumers should be able to have confidence
In this year's budget the federal government gave ASIC money to increase its surveillance and enforcement activities in the financial sector.
For Chandni Gupta, it's encouraging that the regulator is "keen to take action" but she says they can "only go so far". "We need to see a ban, or definitions on generic environmental claims so that there's a clear and shared understanding of what these actual claims mean," she says.
"You should be able to pick up something that says "eco", "bio", "sustainable", and be really confident with what it is … we don't have that at the moment."
She says that could look a little bit like rules around food marketing, like the way "fruit juice" is a regulated term, requiring a drink to contain a minimum amount of actual fruit content.
Similar rules are being considered in both the European Union and United Kingdom.
ACCC Deputy Chair Catriona Lowe says rules like that are a matter for the federal government, "but we certainly in our guidance do steer businesses away from broad general claims, not least because they can mean many different things to many different people and they're inherently difficult to verify."
A Senate committee is currently inquiring into greenwashing, including advertising standards and legislative options, and is due to report back in June next year.