The Prius is the best example. It looks different so it signals your “virtue” to others. That’s why it outsold other hybrids by such a wide margin. Too bad the environment would be better off if you drove a used Japanese car, or even better, an old biodiesel converted Mercedes.

That’s good or bad, depending on how you look at it and/or what it applies to. If your sole concern is profit, alright. But if you consider pressing social issues and the ways in which the “customer perception is customer reality,” you begin to uncover how this phenomenon cripples and hinders bringing about real change. Greenwashing of products is a perfect lens through which to investigate this sometimes unfortunate reality. Americans today are addressing environmental problems in a largely novel way: through consumption. The tactic can be summed up as a call to shop in order to save the world. Increasingly, consumers are choosing to funnel their earnings towards purchasing products they believe will halt global warming or save precious rain forest, not to mention make them happier, healthier, and even more fashionable. In this consumer-centric model for change, there is often little to no emphasis on corporate (producer) or governmental responsibility; the consumer, rather, is both the party responsible for environmental problems and the party possessing the solutions to imminent environmental catastrophe. What this popular but naïve notion of environmentalism ignores, however, is both the overwhelming amount of waste generated in the production phases of even the most “green” products and the implications of the materials life cycle of these products (e.g. even organic, local food scraps end up in poorly designed landfills, producing methane gas; this is largely excluded from mainstream discourse on the topic of food as it relates to environmental problems). As Paul Hawken points out, “individual activity is empowering, but it cannot of itself change the nature of social and environmental degradation.” So while many of these consumers may earnestly have the environment’s best interests at heart, their steadfast belief that we can collectively buy our way out of environmental problems is ultimately futile, if not dangerous.