A few weeks ago I saw a commercial on TV for insect repellent: a pressurized can filled with a chemical capable of killing all kinds of crawling critters, including roaches. Now, anyone who has ever lived in a skyscraper will know that unless they are crushed, these things are nearly indestructible. So anything capable of knocking them out must be powerful.

No matter, the product was presented in bright green livery and, with much fanfare, declared ‘environmentally friendly’. Now let’s be reasonable. How could the spray of a chemical capable of killing roaches and toxic enough to have a red poison label on the side of the container be green?

The twist was this. The active ingredient in the spray is a pyrethroid, a chemical compound found naturally in some plant species. Plants can make the chemical in their leaves to deter insects that want to eat them. So, because the pyrethroid is natural, it has to be green. If it’s in plants, then it should be okay to use in the environment and it should be environmentally friendly.

This is very shaky logic. We could use it to say that a tsunami, volcanic eruption, or uranium is naturally occurring, ergo, environmentally friendly. You see the point.

Greenwash is the common term for this practice of twisting the truth in marketing for a positive environmental spin. The standard definition of greenwashing is when companies make their products and policies environmentally friendly, even when they are not. The related term ‘green glow’ describes organizations that use their public relations and marketing departments to try to show that they are adopting practices that are beneficial to the environment.

It’s hard to see how spraying a chemical that will harm insects is friendly to the environment. Remember that insects perform a number of useful tasks, from pollination to recycling nutrients in the soil. However, this type of product greenwashing happens all the time for all kinds of products and services.

A recent report by marketing firm TerraChoice found that in a random survey of more than 1,000 products, nearly all marketing was tainted by greenwashing. Remarkably, the average number of green products per store has nearly tripled in the three years since 2006.

You can view the report here http://sinsofgreenwashing.org/findings/greenwashing-report-2009/

As concerned consumers, what do we do in the face of this onslaught of the new green? How do we make good choices among the wave of products that claim to be environmentally friendly? Here’s a tip: Think about the big picture.

If a product is friendly to the environment, its use and manufacture must have at least a neutral effect. This is difficult to achieve in modern mass production. Try to imagine what was used to make the product or what its use will do to the environment.

The reason uranium mining can never be green is that a toxic material is exposed, concentrated, and held in a potentially volatile state. This does not mean that it cannot or should not be used in power plants to generate electricity; it just can’t be called green (although it has zero carbon emissions). The big picture is very different to the low-emissions strait.

It may be necessary to use chemicals in concentrations strong enough to be an insecticide. Deltamethrin, an insecticide based on the pyrethroids in insect repellent, has been used in Africa to kill the tsetse fly, a carrier of a parasite that causes sleeping sickness in humans and livestock, over large areas. A similar process, using the more toxic and persistent DDT, eradicated malaria from the US in the early 1950s: more than 4,650,000 homes were sprayed. These actions improved human health and economic prosperity, but they were not friendly to the environment.

So when you see a green label on a product or actors dancing across sunny fields in a commercial for a bug spray, think about what it really means. Are the claims true? You may decide to buy the product, but do so because you need to get rid of bugs and not because you think the product is eco-friendly.

Most likely the green tag is just a green tag and nothing else.