Bluewashing Joins Greenwashing As The New Corporate Whitewashing

While leaders of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) offices and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs deal with criticisms from the likes of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Elon Musk, and Strive Asset Management’s Vivek Ramaswamy on the right, they are also faced with mounting pushback from activists and watchdog groups on the left who use terms such as greenwashing and bluewashing to express their concerns.

The term greenwashing has been around since 1986 when the New York environmentalist Jay Westerveld criticized the hotel industry’s emerging practice of putting notices in their rooms promoting the reuse of towels “to save the environment” while doing little or nothing themselves toward reducing energy use and waste. He asserted that the real objective was increased profits, and he labeled these kind of profitable-but-ineffective “environmentally conscientious” acts as greenwashing.

Since then, the term greenwashing has come to mean any kind of advertising or marketing in which “green” public relations or promotions are deceptively used to persuade the public that a company’s products, policies, and programs are environmentally friendly when they may be doing little to assist the environment in practice.