A couple of weeks ago I finally towed my 1974 VW Beetle from my dad’s garage to my house a couple of hours away. The old VW has been sitting in dad’s garage for well over ten years so we are very excited to have it back - now I just have to get it running again!

I rented a tow dolly from U-Haul to get the VW back to my place, and I was exposed to an interesting marketing gimmick that U-Haul is using to jump on the ‘green bandwagon’. There was a sticker on the tow dolly that said “Towing Reduces Carbon Emissions”. I question this claim for a couple of reasons:

• A lot of towed cars are disabled, like my VW. If a car is disabled, the tow dolly is not responsible for reduced carbon emissions. Emissions are reduced because the vehicle is disabled, which is temporary in most cases

• If a towed car is not disabled, often it is being pulled by a massive RV on a cross-country trip. The car is unloaded to zip around more easily at the various stops along the way. If the tow dolly is used for this purpose, should they really be claiming to be reducing emissions? The much better way to reduce emissions in this scenario is to leave the RV at home and take the car on the road trip instead.

There is actually a new word for this kind of questionable marketing - greenwashing. While greenwashing doesn’t have an entry in Merriam-Webster’s yet, it is defined in Wikipedia as “… a term that is used to describe the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service.”

And don’t think that U-Haul is the only company guilty of this - they just happen to be one that I had a direct interaction with recently. In reality there is so much greenwashing occurring out there that I could probably fill a thick book with different examples. Just be aware of the trend and make your own judgment call as to whether a company or their products are really as green as they claim to be. Here are a few other websites that can help you out:

http://www.greenwashingindex.com/

http://www.greenwashing.net/

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/sustainability/greenwash/