The Federal Trade Commission will begin to ramp up enforcement of deceptive environmental claims, according to Jessica Rich, director of the commission’s consumer protection bureau.
“A growing number of consumers are looking to buy green products and companies respond with green marketing. But sometimes what companies think green claims mean and what consumers think they mean are two different things,” Rich said at the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council conference last month.
The coming crackdown on environmental claims follows an update of the FTC’s Green Guides last year that set forth the commission’s current views on environmental marketing to help business avoid making unfair or deceptive claims.
That ramp up follows three lawsuits, the FTC announced in Federal Register notices in August, settled unsupported claims that products were free of volatile organic compounds.
According to the FTC’s lawsuit detailed in the Federal Register Notice Relief-Mart, falsely advertised its Biogreen memory foam mattresses don’t contain VOCs, have no VOC off-gassing, and don’t have the smell consumers often associate with memory foam.
In the second lawsuit against Essentia Natural Memory Foam Company, the FTC charged that Essentia didn’t have appropriate proof to back up claims that its mattresses are VOC-free, have “[n]o chemical off-gassing or odor,” and unlike other memory foam mattresses that “can emit up to 61 chemicals” are “free from all those harmful VOCs.”
In the third case, the FTC attacked Ecobaby Organics’ advertising mattresses as “chemical free,” with no formaldehyde, toluene, benzene, VOCs, or toxic substances. Ecobaby’s promotional materials featured the seal of NAOMI, the National Association of Organic Mattress Industry and the FTC says the ads also falsely conveyed that NAOMI was an independent certifying organization when the truth is that NAOMI is nothing more than Ecobaby itself.
You will want to read the orders for the details (click on the links above), and savvy green businesses will pay close attention to provisions addressing “free of” claims. The orders prohibit the companies from making VOC free claims unless the emission level is zero micrograms per cubic meter or if they have competent and reliable scientific evidence that the products in question contain no more than a “trace level” of VOCs. The “trace level” standard comes from Green Guides.
An earlier blog post Gotcha: FTC Enforcement of “VOC Free” Claims for Paint described how green marketing presents an enormously valuable strategy for increasing brand value – cutting across all sectors, but that the legal implications for environmental marketing claims call for caution.
Environmental claims and much more will be the subject of my educational session at Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Philadelphia on Friday, November 22nd at 8:00 a.m. Register today for “G09: Marketing Green Building: A Competitive Advantage Without Greenwash”.