Glossary

Bluewashing is similar to greenwashing in its cynical nature. It occurs when enterprises align to United Nations Initiatives such as the UN Global Compact (“Blue being the colour of the United Nations Flag), in order to give visibility and credibility to their environmental, social and human rights commitments without necessarily undertaking the substantive changes required to fully implement these in practice SDG washing is a form of blue-washing which occurs when enterprises acknowledge & highlight their alignment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals but don’t actually make any meaningful contributions to achieving the goals.
Green & bluewashing occurs when enterprises spend more on marketing their environmental & social credentials than actually achieving them and are interpreted by the public and other enterprise stakeholders as enterprises paying lip service to sustainable development.

See Also: Greenwashing.

Greenwashing is defined as “behaviour or activities that make people believe that an enterprise is doing more to protect the environment than it really is” . The term was coined by Jay Westerveld, a New York Biologist and Environmentalist when he wrote an essay in 1986 about the hypocritical practices of the hotel industry. When on holidays Westerveld observed that the hotel he was staying in, asked customers to ‘save their towels’ in a bid to conserve water & protect the environment, whilst on the other hand, seemed to care very little about the environment when it came to their own expansion plans. Westerveld believed the hotel was motivated more by saving on laundry costs than saving the planet and that this cynical marketing ploy would eventually be exposed, observing that “It all comes out in the greenwash”.

Source: The Guardian 2016, Orange and Cohen 2010.