单选题 Scot Case was not happy. Vice president of the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, Case last year sent his researchers into a big retail store to evaluate the green advertising claims of some of the products on its shelves. The results were startling, of the 1,018 products TerraChoice surveyed, all but one failed to live up fully to their green boasts. Words like nontoxic were used in meaninglessly vague ways. Terms like Energy Star certified were in fact not backed up by certification.
Many consumers may not have heard the term greenwashing, but they"ve surely experienced it—misleading marketing about the environmental benefits of a product. Greenwashing isn"t new—ever since the environment emerged as an issue in the early 1970s, there have been advertising firms trying to convince consumers that buying Brand X is the only way to save the earth. But as going green has become big business—sales of organic products alone went from $10 billion in 2003 to more than $20 billion in 2007—companies appear eager to associate themselves with the environment, deservedly or not.
If you"re not yet sick of seeing rotating wind turbines and solar panels on TV, you will be. the new fall season is likely to feature a flood of green advertising. It"s gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been holding hearings over the past year to define the difference between genuine environmental claims and empty greenwash. It"s not easy—and environmental advocates worry that truly green companies could get lost in all the clamor.
"We have such a challenge ahead of us on climate change," says Kevin Tuerff, a co-founder of the marketing consultancy EnviroMedia. "Greenwashing harms the effort we need to be making."
The first step to cleaning up greenwashing is to identify it, and Tuerff and his partners have hit on an innovative way to direct public attention to particularly bad examples. They"ve launched the Greenwashing Index (www.greenwashingindex.com), a website that allows consumers to post ads that might be examples of greenwashing and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5—1 is a little green lie; 5 is an outright falsehood.
It"s a simple device, but it shows the power of the Internet to trace misleading ads; with a simple Web search, any consumer can find out if a car manufacturer boasting of its fuel-efficient hybrids actually earns the majority of its revenue selling gas-consuming trucks and SUVs. "We try to make it a little more transparent with the index," says Kim Sheehan, a communications professor at the University of Oregon and a co-founder of the site. "It teaches people to be a little more cautious about the claims they hear."

单选题 Why is Scot not happy?

单选题 If a product is "greenwashed", ______

单选题 One danger in letting greenwashing go without control is that ______

单选题 What is the purpose of the Greenwashing Index?

单选题 The author wants to make consumers aware that ______