The bottle promises respect for the planet, the box shows off raw paper, the brand uses the right vocabulary. Green now comes first: before the product, before the supply chain, before the numbers. It comes as a relief for the conscience of those who buy, who in the meantime are trying to orient themselves in a market where sustainability has become a commercial language in all respects. And it is precisely there, in that language, that greenwashing continues to find space.
The term has been around for decades, ever since Jay Westerveld linked it to the famous scene of hotels that invited people to reuse towels “for the environment”, while above all there was a saving on laundry costs. Since then, makeup has become more refined, more elegant, more technical, more difficult to dismantle.
When green becomes a promise that eases the conscience
The paper by Federico Boffa, Piersilvio De Bortoli and Andrea Nicolodi, published on Economic Lettersputs his finger right on this passage. The idea is uncomfortable because it shifts the discussion away from ready-made morality: greenwashing, in certain markets, does not always present itself as the opposite of true environmental investments. He can accompany them.
In the theoretical model of the three signatures, companies act in a context where consumers see imperfect signals: certifications, reports, campaigns, labels, audits. All elements that cost money, and for this reason they seem reliable. In that context the company can really improve something and at the same time overestimate the story of that improvement. The result is an equilibrium in which greenwashing emerges as a structural possibility, while authentic investment and its exaggeration end up supporting each other.
This intuition has a rare merit: it resembles the market more than many sermons on the market. For years, the literature has reported that greenwashing arises from a combination of weak regulatory pressures, demand for reputation, consumer and investor expectations, and internal company incentives. In a now classic work, Magali Delmas and Vanessa Burbano already described the phenomenon as the product of external, organizational and individual drivers, within a system that rewards green laying much more than it controls the green substance. The novelty of the paper by Boffa and colleagues lies in showing that the lie, sometimes, does not rely on the void: it relies on a piece of truth, takes it and inflates it.
For those who buy, separating a real gesture from a drawn-out story remains much more difficult than people say. An experimental study published in 2024 tested consumers’ ability to recognize greenwashed products in two experiments with 700 participants in Germany. The fact that remains is simple: when people were only asked if they would buy, greenwashing worked. However, when they were pushed to explicitly evaluate the possibility of being faced with misleading communication, they became better at separating truly green products from those that were simply well dressed. The market rewards quick storytelling, while doubt requires attention, time and mental friction.
And here the problem widens. Because greenwashing doesn’t just damage the individual purchasing choice. Dig trust into environmental language as a whole. Already in 2013, Chen and Chang showed, with an empirical analysis of Taiwanese consumers, that greenwashing lowers green trust by increasing confusion and perceived risk. More recently, other works have confirmed that the perception of greenwashing reduces trust, purchase intention and loyalty towards the brand, with visible effects also on packaging and campaigns that declare sustainability without actually being able to support it. When this mistrust settles, the smart and serious brands collapse together. And that’s where the damage becomes systemic.
Rules are useful, but they enter slippery slopes
The temptation, faced with this picture, is linear: just make consumers more aware, tighten controls, and greenwashing will retreat. Partly it happens. The paper by Economic Letters but he warns that the matter does not end there. If consumers learn to be more wary of exaggerations, the reputational return on authentic green investments also declines. In other words, the company derives less advantage from saying “I am sustainable”, and at the same time it can derive less advantage from actually becoming so. It is the thorniest step of the model: the fight against greenwashing can also compress a portion of the economic incentives that drive environmental investments.
From then on, the quality of the rules counts. The European Union moves on two tracks. On the one hand there is Directive 2024/825, already adopted, which strengthens consumer protection against misleading practices and generic environmental claims; Member States must implement it by 27 March 2026 and the rules will apply from 27 September 2026. On the other hand, the work on the Green Claims Directive, proposed by the Commission in 2023 and still in institutional negotiations, remains open, with the aim of imposing verifiable bases on environmental declarations. The direction is clear: raise the cost of vagueness, of the convenient formula, of the ecological adjective used as decoration.
Letting companies have a free hand would be a shortcut. Thinking of solving everything with morality as well. We need a structure that makes environmental investment convenient and a rigged story much riskier. Research, moreover, continues to point out another very real problem: measuring greenwashing remains difficult. A methodological review from 2024 shows that scholars still capture it with very different tools, including gaps between real performance and communication, textual analyses, ESG data and indirect indicators. This is also why the public debate often struggles: the phenomenon is real, recognisable, harmful, and at the same time eludes a single clean operational definition.
Greenwashing tells a very simple thing about green markets: green sells because it promises to buy a little peace. Businesses know it, consumers feel it, regulators try to chase this friction with ever finer tools. There remains a threshold that should be kept in mind. When the distance between what is done and what is said becomes too wide, the damage does not remain in advertising. Enter collective trust. And when that breaks, the color remains on the shelves. The rest evaporates.
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