Water companies in England ‘use greenwashing playbook to hide environmental harm’. Researchers say companies have prolonged injustice and exaggerated cost of solving infrastructure problems, the Guardian reports.
Water companies are adopting disinformation tactics similar to those used by the fossil fuel and tobacco industries with the widespread use of greenwashing to downplay the environmental harm they cause, a study says. Environmental scientists analysed the communications of the nine main water and sewerage companies in England, and compared them with a framework of 28 greenwashing tactics employed, researchers say, by the tobacco, alcohol, fossil fuels and chemical industries. The water companies have adopted 22 of these tactics to downplay environmental harm, misrepresent information, undermine scientific research, shift blame and delay action, the researchers say.
Read the article in the Guardian
Water industry strategies to manufacture doubt and deflect blame for sewage pollution in England. Abstract
The water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) in England are majority-owned by a range of global investors. The industry is under intense scrutiny for widespread failure in its environmental performance, discharging 12.7 million monitored hours of untreated wastewater and sewage into English waterways between 2019 and the end of 2023. At the time of writing, multiple investigations by environmental and financial regulators are in progress, and regulatory oversight is under review by the recently formed Office for Environmental Protection. While limited monitoring hid the full extent of underperformance, we argue that the WaSCs have prolonged this environmental disaster through strategies that mirror those of other large polluting industries in the past. We test this hypothesis for the nine major WaSCs in England against a published framework of 28 ‘greenwashing/deception’ tactics of large industries. We identified 22 of these tactics that could be seen as disinformation, greenwashing and manufacturing doubt. The financial exploitation of water resources in England, alongside long-term degradation of infrastructure and ineffective regulation, raises globally important issues around water security, ethics and environmental stewardship. Much greater scrutiny of both industry performance and industry communication is required.
