How to Spot Greenwashing Claims When You Travel
Finding legitimately eco-friendly travel options is difficult, not to mention time-consuming. The gap between sustainability claims and practices can be quite large, and greenwashing isn’t always easy to identify.
But there are signs to look for. Researchers in Turkey recently identified five key categories to describe the most common forms of tourism-related greenwashing: eco-certifications, inadequate waste management, misleading carbon offsetting claims, destination-based overconsumption, and the use of the “green development” label to mask social injustice and environmental harm.
“Businesses facing demands for environmental and social responsibility frequently engage in gestures that are largely for show,” the authors wrote in a paper published in May in the journal Frontiers in Sustainability.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned, the paper makes clear, but there are also ways to cut through the noise. Independent and robust certification systems play a huge role; local businesses are also important, since corporate chains are...
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