Firms still greenwashing in adverts after being censured, UK investigation finds | Advertising

Companies continued to publish misleading green ads after censorship before propaganda ASA, according to the investigation.

Investigative Press Unit at Greenpeace UK, discovered, reports Virgin AtlanticRenault and Woya Bora are among the companies that have continued to publish baseless claims about environmental accreditation data for their products after he was asked to remove these ads by monitoring ads.

In 2021, ASA announced a green washing campaign, as it takes the pillars of companies to submit claims without evidence. 44 companies provided misleading ads. Recently last week, five of these companies were still publishing claims that they were subjected to controlling them, according to what he said.

ASA rules mean that advertisers need to be clear about the evidence behind any environmental claims, and a large burden of proof is needed for any absolute claims, such as that the product is “sustainable” or “environmentally friendly”. The International Energy Agency has some powers to ensure companies comply with their provisions; It says whether companies are looking to ignore the rules, as it “can” greatly harm their reputation. “However, they do not have the ability to issue fines for advertisers.

The available penalties include the company’s naming on the ASA website, and I ask the search engines to remove paid search ads that contain the claim, and asks social media companies to remove “unacceptable content”, and to remove their paid search ads that name the company.

Virgin Atlantic kept “installed” functions to the top Instagram, Tiktok and X accounts, claiming that she had completed the first via Atlantic flight using “100 % sustainable flying fuel”, according to Diserthed. This is although ASA issues a ruling against the airline nine months ago for this drafting in the advertisement, because it is possible that consumers will lead to the estimate of carbon savings for the use of fuel – I believed that consumers would explain “100 % sustainable fuel” that it means that fuel was completely sustainable with no negative environmental impact.

Renault has published videos on Facebook and YouTube again and again Last year, its hybrid cars “up to 80 % of the city’s electrical driving”, despite the ASA ruling for 2023, who finds this formulation is misleading.

Other car manufacturers continued to make green claims about their cars after control by ASA. Last year, MG promoted its hybrid cars as “zero emissions”, but ASA ruled the misleading claim, because the hybrid vehicles are not zero when they are operated with gasoline or diesel. Electric vehicles are zero emissions only when driving if the electricity that is shipped is 100 % renewable. A August 2024 booklet for an electric car that promotes it in an original advertisement that was banned by ASA used again and again the term “zero emissions” without clarification. Meanwhile, the MG4 advertisement used on the company’s website indicates that drivers can “embrace zero emissions” without clarification.

The first page of the bottled water brand in Aqua Pura was proud of its “new environmentally friendly hats”, three years after ASA asked the company to stop claiming that the plastic bottle covers were “environmentally friendly”. Asa Easigrass, which manufactures plastic meadows, told ASA more than a year ago to stop naming its “environmentally friendly” artificial herbal products. However, she continued to claim its website that one of its plastic herbal products is “environmentally friendly and recyclable by 100 %.” At that time, the International Energy Agency said that there is no evidence that plastic grass was “environmentally friendly” and that only one facility in the UK can recycle plastic grass.

“Our pioneering work in the world on climate change and the environment is still a priority and we continue to monitor green claims in a proactive way using the active ads monitoring system based on artificial intelligence, as we found advertisements that potentially break our rules and get those that quickly modified or removed them.

“We see companies adapt and develop to prove the existence of more accurate and more accurate green claims. For example, after the provisions of our airlines on” sustainable “and” environmentally friendly claims, among the allegations about 140,000 advertisements are monitored, five companies were found in the high range.

A spokesman for Virgin Atlantic said:

“Social publications were shared to celebrate the achievement, and to show the expansion of the project and the challenges that are still on the industry to achieve zero zero.”

“Renault will assume its responsibilities very seriously and will be fulfilled on the issues that were raised,” said Renault.

An AQUA PURA spokesman said his advertising team had recently been restructured, which means that it was difficult to implement all recommendations, adding: “We will verify the current and future application of all recommendations related to environmental demands, especially on our website.”

MG MG MOTOR UK said: “MG Motor UK is completely acceptable, then I immediately responded to ASA at that time, and this is related to a hybrid vehicle that is also displayed alongside the EV model, and this was a clarification point from the ASA that we accepted. We will always collaborate fully and actively with ASA in relation to any guidelines and all our creative teams actually achieved for that.”

“We acknowledge the ASA virtue of March 2024 and can confirm that the marketing language referred to in your message has been set to remove it after this decision. While our intention is to ensure that all relevant content is updated accordingly, there seem that there is a small number of archived references that our web team has lost unintentionally.”