It’s hard keeping up with the greenwashers these days.
Kim Kardashian’s clothing and shapewear brand SKIMS has been accused of deceiving customers using greenwashing tactics on some of its packaging.
Photos shared on Greenwash.com, a website created by the Changing Markets Foundation, show a SKIMS product package prominently marked with several phrases about the product’s alleged eco-friendliness, like, “I AM NOT PLASTIC,” “I am compostable made from plants,” and “I will biodegrade in your home compost and in an industrial compost facility.”
The foundation, which was formed to leverage consumer markets to accelerate sustainability solutions, found nothing that supported SKIMS’ claims of being environmentally friendly.
The packaging shows a triangular number 4 recycling symbol logo, meaning it’s made from a low-density polyethylene (LDPE) type 4 plastic.
Changing Markets Foundation explained that, “While this packaging might decompose in practice, as claimed, it is completely misleading to say that it is not plastic.”
Essentially, SKIMS is greenwashing, which is when businesses spend more time and money to achieve the image of being sustainable than on actual concrete actions to reduce their negative environmental impact.
As a result, consumers are fed incorrect or very select information that misleads them and prompts them to make uninformed purchase decisions — when they were specifically looking to do the opposite.
More than 40% of environmentally-sound claims are manipulative, misleading, or entirely incorrect, making greenwashing, unfortunately, an all too common practice, according to the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network.
In a review of SKIMS, sustainable and ethical fashion review platform Good On You said the brand “provides insufficient relevant information about how it reduces its impact on people, the planet, and animals.”
In a nod to Kim K’s recent inflammatory comments about women who don’t want “to work these days,” Good On You added that “it’s time SKIMS ‘gets its a** up’ and starts disclosing more information about how, where, and by whom its items are produced, as well as the materials used.”
The platform also awarded SKIMS its lowest score of “We Avoid” due to the brand not disclosing details about its supply chain’s sustainability commitment.
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