Which would yield a kind of brown alert... Anyway, This Thursday, August 18, Ali Geering-Kline of the Center for Environmental Health and Jennifer Kaplan, author of Greening Your Small Business, will be conducting a discussion “salon” called “The Red Flags of Greenwashing,” in which they will help attendees identify the warning signs that a company is engaging in environmentally misleading PR practices. If you’re in the Berkeley, CA, area, you might want to check it out. Over at the Ecopreneurist, Ms. Kaplan suggests how companies can avoid indulging in greenwashing. A sample:

To decide whether you can position a particular product or service as green, ask yourself these questions about your marketing:

• Does it exaggerate an environmental achievement in order to divert attention away from an environmental problem?
• Does it focus on one environmental achievement but conceal other environmental impacts?
• Does it tout environmental achievements that are required or mandated by existing laws?
• Is it impossible to substantiate the environmental claims?
• If you use a third-party certification or eco-label to promote your business, does it have reasonable yet stringent criteria?
• Are the environmental claims vague or meaningless?

As Ms. Kaplan points out, greenwashing should be of concern to us all as it fosters cynicism about efforts to improve environmental sustainability, and casts us all in a bad light. It also undermines those companies that are truly ding good work in thinking and acting sustainably.