Greenwashing is Unacceptable

Oil giant Shell misled the public when it claimed in an advertisement that its giant $10bn oil sands project in northern Canada was a "sustainable energy source", according to the Advertising standards authority.

The tar sands cover over 140,000 square kilometres of Alberta and contain nearly 173bn barrels of oil in the form of bitumen. This is strip-mined from vast open pits and the bitumen is then heated, using far larger amounts of energy than in normal oil operations, therefore causing greater carbon dioxide emissions.

A recent report suggested that the production of oil from tar sands can create up to eight times as many emissions as producing conventional oil.In one of the most significant "greenwash" rulings in some years, the independent body responsible for regulating UK advertising upheld a complaint from green campaign group WWF that Shell's advert in the Financial Times was "misleading".

This isn't the first time that Shell has been caught misleading the public about it's environmental performance, in November 2007, Friends of the Earth filed a complaint after viewing a Shell ad that showed flowers spouting from the chimney of an oil refinery, suggesting the company used all of its CO2 waste for beneficial purposes like flower growing. Shell actually uses only 0.325% of its CO2 waste in this way. The ads also claimed that the company’s waste sulphur was used as a concrete strengthening agent. Surprisingly, this was also not the case. An immensely small amount of sulphur waste is used for this purpose.

The ASA declared the ads misleading. They forced Shell to immediately withdraw the advertisement and promise not to use it in the future.

The ASA also ruled that Shell's construction of the world's largest refinery in Texas, also mentioned in the advertisement, was not helping sustainable energy production.

Related Articles
Tesco and Local Produce
BMW Efficient Dynamics
Fast Food with a Conscience