What Is Greenwashing? Our AI Tool Checks Green Claims

In a very short time, artificial intelligence has become an immense opportunity for many sectors. It often raises questions. First because it can be used for questionable purposes, but also because of its ecological footprint. In our view, though, like any tool it can also serve the ecological transition if it is used effectively and intelligently.

It was by thinking about the scope of its applications and about the environmental stakes of the communications sector that we came up with the idea of developing an AI tool against greenwashing. Here is a look back at the project.


What is greenwashing?

"The term greenwashing is usually used to describe any claim that may mislead the public about the real ecological quality of a product or a service, or about the reality of an organisation's sustainable development approach, whatever the channel used to spread it" - ADEME

More generally, we can say that greenwashing covers every form of communication that can mislead consumers about the environmental benefits of a product, a service or an organisation. In short, it is when something is made to look, consciously or unconsciously, as if it had less impact on our planet than it really does.

And that has consequences for society. The presence of greenwashing in the world of communication slows down the ecological transition for several reasons:

• It diverts money flows towards products, services or companies whose sustainable development approach is weaker, or even non-existent. This holds back the progress of the companies that are genuinely "more responsible" in terms of sustainable development.

• It damages our trust in corporate communication, because we no longer tell apart the companies that are truly committed from those that are less so.

• It creates a fear of communicating among companies that are trying to commit but know they are not yet perfect. This phenomenon is known as greenhushing, and it is just as negative because it prevents whole sectors from raising their environmental game.

But believe it or not, many companies and many communications professionals do not engage in greenwashing deliberately. They are simply not very aware of the ethical rules governing green advertising, and they want to talk about the initiatives they are putting in place without communicating them properly. There is in fact a major knowledge gap.

‍

The new European Union directive to fight greenwashing

Although greenwashing has been a familiar subject for some time, big news came out of the European Union's buildings in early 2024: a new directive was passed to fight greenwashing in Europe.

It did not come out of nowhere. It builds on a European Union study from 2020 which showed that 53% of environmental claims were vague, misleading or unsubstantiated.

The directive therefore aims to regulate "green claims" much more tightly, and in particular what are known as generic environmental claims. That means words such as "ecological", "sustainable", "good for the planet" and so on that appear in communications. The directive also sets out to regulate the use of the notion of carbon neutrality.

These notions have long been part of the advertising ethics rules issued by the juries in Belgium and France, but they were purely informative. No regulation required companies to pay attention to them. That will change from 2026 onwards, depending on how each country transposes the directive.

‍

This directive is a wonderful opportunity to raise awareness among companies, communications professionals and citizens about the rules that apply to environmental claims. And to do so before any sanctions come into force.

An AI tool against greenwashing: why and how?

If we decided to get involved in building an AI tool against greenwashing, it is because we are aware that identifying every form of greenwashing across all of a company's content is extremely long and complex work.

Greenwashing is not limited to advertising: it concerns every form of communication. It can therefore appear in social media posts, in a company's thousands of product sheets, on its website, in a brochure, and so on.

Our tool is therefore designed to handle all that content quickly and easily:

‍

• You add your content of any type (audio, video, text, image, and so on) to our platform, or automatically by integrating our API into your internal processes.
  

• Our tool decodes the communication material and checks whether it contains environmental claims that could be problematic under advertising ethics rules and the new European directive.

• It delivers the results of its analysis, pointing out the problematic aspects of each piece of your content along with solutions to fix them.

Today this tool is called Alios: it analyses images, videos, audio files, PDFs and texts against the rules of the JEP, the ARPP, the ADEME guide and the European directive on environmental claims.

‍

It can therefore be used by communications professionals who want to check their advertising content (from script stage to final version), by companies that want to analyse their entire database of product sheets (or any other type of material), and even by citizens with an interest in the subject.

Our tool is still under development, but a first version already exists internally. With it, we are carrying out a large-scale study on greenwashing in Belgium together with the advertising sales houses RMB (which represents RTBF among others) & JCDecaux.

We are aware that AI also has an ecological footprint. That is why our development plan includes a stage dedicated to a study of its environmental impact. Depending on the results, we will decide on the next steps for its rollout.

‍

In conclusion

Greenwashing is still very much present in communications. In Europe, 53% of environmental claims are unsubstantiated. Fighting this greenwashing is necessary in order to obtain transparent messages and thereby restore consumer trust in the environmental claims made in corporate communications. We want to position our anti-greenwashing tool as a verification baseline that supports the steps the European Union is planning against greenwashing. And in doing so, help the sector aim for zero greenwashing and accelerate the ecological transition.