The Green Sheen

Like all forms of industry, the Green economy and marketplace will be subject to great scrutiny, major success stories, flops and falsehoods. Greenwashing, a term decades old, has just sprouted into this glorious new marketplace.

Perhaps no industry has embraced the green mantra more than housing. And with that has come a lot more hype.

Green building consultant Carl Seville says that although many builders claim to be green, most “aren’t there yet.” As a result, the Decatur, Ga., resident says, buyers who want a green home but don’t really know what they want “are caught in the cross-hairs.”

A nationally recognized consultant who helps builders and developers create healthy, efficient and sustainable projects, Jennifer Languell says greenwashing not only “spans all spectrums” of the housing market but is “extremely prevalent.”

Many builders “do as little as possible” to be green, she says. “The common attitude is, ‘Do the minimum.’ It is rare that a builder really wants to raise the bar.”

Languell, president of Trifecta Construction Solutions in Fort Myers, Fla., says she sees exaggerations of the green aspects of the building products that go into a single-family home as well as entire projects. And a December 2007 study by TerraChoice, a Canadian environmental marketing firm, backs her up.

In a survey of six big-box retailers, TerraChoice found that only one of the 1,018 consumer products tested did not make false claims with regard to greenness. Why? Because there is no such thing as pure green, Languell says, only greener.

With everything coming up Green, it pays to educate yourself.
For the complete article via LA Times: Green claims get big buildup