Zero Waste Glossary

Greenwashing:  Companies that tout their green efforts or products and may have good intentions, but the scale of the "greening" is limited to a narrow sphere. Three simplified examples of greenwashing would be a large corporation using solar to power one or two buildings and built with sustainable building materials in those buildings but actually own hundreds or thousands of buildings that are not and and new buildings are not planned to be modernized. Second example would be companies that produce environmentally benign cleaning products but the labeling and packaging is not environmentally benign plus the bulk of their other cleaners produced are environmentally toxic. Finally, the third is an energy company who invests a few million in renewable energy research but billions in new exploration, extraction and marketing of fossil fuels. It all comes down to scale of investment and the big picture.


Upcycled:  That means rather then use energy in melting and reforming the material into something else, as in traditional recycling, we maintain the value that the material’s shape provides, creating something entirely different. Less energy, better results.