Greenwashing 101: How to Spot It on a Supermarket Shelf

Walk down any supermarket aisle and you’ll be surrounded by it. Leaves on the label. Earthy green-and-brown colour schemes. Words like “natural,” “pure,” “eco,” “clean,” and “gentle” in friendly rounded fonts. Everything looks wholesome. Everything looks like it cares.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of it is marketing, and a lot of it means absolutely nothing.

I want to be careful and precise in this post, because greenwashing is a topic where it’s easy to overstate things and lose credibility. So I’m going to stick to what’s genuinely true and verifiable — and give you a practical toolkit for seeing through the packaging, whatever you’re buying.

First: what greenwashing actually is

Greenwashing is when a company spends more effort looking environmentally responsible than actually being it. The term has been around since 1986, and the practice is now so widespread that a 2020 European Union study found over half of examined environmental claims were vague, misleading or unfounded, and 40% were completely unsubstantiated. 

The most useful framework I’ve come across is TerraChoice’s “seven sins of greenwashing,” which breaks down the common tactics. A few worth knowing:

• The hidden trade-off: calling something “green” based on one narrow attribute while ignoring everything else. Recycled paper that came from a clear-felled forest, for example.
• No proof: a claim you can’t verify anywhere — no certification, no accessible evidence.
• Vagueness: a term so broad it’s basically meaningless. “All-natural” is the classic.
• Worshipping false labels: packaging designed to look like it has a third-party endorsement when it doesn’t — a little badge or seal that the company just… made up.
• Irrelevance: a claim that’s technically true but useless, like “CFC-free” on products where CFCs have been banned for decades anyway.

Once you know these, you start seeing them everywhere.

The words that legally mean nothing

Here’s the key thing to understand: many of the most reassuring words on packaging are completely unregulated. There’s no legal standard they have to meet. Anyone can use them on anything.

• “Natural” — essentially meaningless. There’s no agreed definition and no enforcement. Arsenic is natural. Crude oil is natural. The word tells you nothing about whether a product is good for you or the planet.
• “Eco-friendly” / “green” — same problem. Broad, undefined, unregulated.
• “Clean” — a newer marketing favourite, and just as undefined as the rest.
• “Pure” — sounds lovely, means nothing specific.
• “Non-toxic” — no standardised legal definition in most contexts.

None of these words are necessarily lies. The point is they’re not promises either. They’re vibes. And a product can carry every one of them while still being, underneath, exactly the same as the conventional product next to it.

I’ll give you a real example that has stuck with me. Someone once told me a weed killer was “good stuff, natural” — because that’s what the green bottle implied. It was glyphosate. When I mentioned what glyphosate actually is, they had no idea what I was talking about. They’d trusted the colour of the bottle and the friendly font, and the word “natural” had done exactly what it was designed to do. That’s not a failing on their part — it’s that the education around these chemicals still isn’t everywhere, and the marketing is specifically built to fill that gap with reassurance instead of information.

Here’s a related red flag, from another weed-killer conversation (I clearly have these a lot): same “it’s natural stuff” argument — but this time, when I went looking, the ingredients list was nowhere to be found. Not on the label, not on the website, nowhere. That’s one of the biggest warning signs there is. If a company is proud of what’s in a product, they tell you what’s in it. When the ingredients are genuinely hard to find, it’s worth asking why.

Where it gets really sneaky: personal care

This is the area I find most worth paying attention to, because the gap between the front of the bottle and the back of the bottle can be enormous — and it’s where a lot of us are exposed daily, through body wash, shampoo, dishwashing liquid, and soaps.

Here’s the tactic, and it’s a clever one: a brand features a few lovely-sounding botanical ingredients prominently on the front — argan oil, aloe vera, chamomile, coconut — while the actual functional chemistry of the product, listed in tiny print on the back, is entirely conventional. The nice ingredients may genuinely be in there, but often in trace amounts near the bottom of the list (ingredients are listed in descending order of quantity, which is why the bottom of the list matters).

So what’s actually doing the work? Usually a handful of ingredients worth learning to recognise:

• Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS) and sodium laureth sulfate (SLES) — these are the surfactants that make products foam up. That rich lather we associate with “clean” is largely a sensory trick; foam has little to do with how well something actually cleans. SLS in particular can strip and irritate skin. SLES is generally milder, but here’s the catch worth knowing: because of how it’s manufactured (a process called ethoxylation), SLES can be contaminated with trace 1,4-dioxane, which is classified as a possible human carcinogen. The amounts are small and contested, but it’s a reasonable thing to want to avoid where you can.
• Anything ending in “-eth” (like laureth, or PEG compounds) — the “-eth” signals that same ethoxylation process, so it’s a useful flag.
• Parabens (methylparaben, propylparaben, etc.) — preservatives that some studies suggest may act as weak endocrine (hormone) disruptors. The science isn’t fully settled and the doses are low, but they’re being phased out of a lot of formulas precisely because of the concern.
• “Fragrance” or “parfum” — possibly the sneakiest single word on any label. Under trade-secret rules, a manufacturer can hide a whole undisclosed cocktail of chemicals behind that one word. You genuinely cannot know what’s in it.
• Formaldehyde-releasing preservatives (like DMDM hydantoin) — exactly what they sound like, slowly releasing small amounts of formaldehyde over time.

I want to be measured here: most of these ingredients are legal, and the doses in a single product are small. I’m not trying to scare you. But the point stands — a body wash can be covered in leaves and the word “natural” while containing every single one of these.

The label out front and the chemistry out back are two different conversations.

A practical toolkit for seeing through it

You don’t need a chemistry degree. You need a few habits:

1. Ignore the front, read the back. The marketing lives on the front. The truth lives in the ingredients list. Always flip it over.
2. Remember the list is ranked. Ingredients are listed most-to-least. If the lovely botanical is near the end, it’s barely in there. 
3. Treat unregulated words as decoration. “Natural,” “clean,” “eco,” “pure” — lovely, but they’re not claims, they’re mood lighting. 
4. Look for specifics, not vibes. “Certified organic by [body]” is a claim. “Made with natural goodness” is not. Real claims name a standard, a percentage, or a certifier. 
5. Be suspicious of a single green attribute. If a product is shouting about one eco-feature, ask what it’s not mentioning. 
6. Watch for invented badges. A genuine certification can be looked up. A made-up seal cannot.

Where to find people (and apps) who’ve done the work for you

If all of this feels like a lot to carry around the supermarket, the good news is you don’t have to do it alone.

Ethically Kate (ethicallykate.com) is a New Zealand resource I point people to constantly. Kate Hall has built a directory of genuinely vetted, tested brands across food, body care, homewares and clothing — the whole point of it is to cut through exactly the kind of greenwashing this post is about, so you don’t have to interrogate every label yourself. It’s one of the most useful sustainability resources we have in this country.

There are also barcode-scanner apps that read an ingredients list for you and flag the things worth knowing about. A quick, honest caveat: many of these were built for European or US markets, so their databases don’t always recognise New Zealand products — you’ll hit “product not found” more often here than someone in France would. But they’re improving, they let you contribute missing products, and they’re genuinely useful, especially for personal care. A few worth trying:

• Yuka — probably the best known. Scans food and cosmetics, assigns a colour-coded health rating, explains each ingredient, and suggests better alternatives. It’s independent with no in-app advertising. NZ product coverage is patchy but growing.
• Open Food Facts — a free, non-profit, open-source database run by volunteers worldwide. No subscription, no ads, and because anyone can add products, the NZ catalogue keeps expanding. Food-focused rather than cosmetics.
• CodeCheck — scans food and beauty products and specifically flags things like palm oil, parabens, microbeads and paraffin, which makes it handy for the personal-care concerns above.
• OnFork — a newer scanner that flags additives like parabens and phthalates with an ingredient breakdown.

One important note on these apps, because it matters: they’re a guide, not gospel. They simplify genuinely complex science into a single score, and they can sometimes be over-cautious — dinging a product for an additive that’s actually low-risk, for instance. Use them to learn and to spot the obvious red flags, not to panic over every number. The goal is to become a more confident label-reader over time, not to outsource your judgement to an app forever.

And honestly, that’s the same principle I try to run Nomad on. The reason a zero-waste bulk store can feel like a relief is that it takes a whole category of this nonsense off the table. When something is sold loose, by weight, in a clear dispenser or bulk bin, there’s no elaborate front-of-pack marketing standing between you and the product. You can see exactly what it looks like, right there in front of you, and decide for yourself. No leaves printed on a label telling you how to feel about it — just the actual thing.

And for the products that do have several ingredients — granolas, snack bars, cookies — the ingredients list is right there, plain and simple, the way it should be. It’s not that bulk shopping makes companies honest. It’s that selling things loose and transparent removes the space where misleading claims and clever tricks usually live. There’s less room to dress something up as what it isn’t.

That’s not me claiming Nomad is perfect. It’s just that when you can see the product with your own eyes and read a straightforward ingredients list, the whole game of front-of-pack persuasion mostly falls away. And I’ve come to think that’s one of the quietly best things about shopping this way.

Shop honest, package-free basics at Nomad

Sources

TerraChoice “Seven Sins of Greenwashing” (via Wikipedia / UL)

European Commission 2020 study on environmental claims (via Wikipedia)

US FTC Green Guides — guidance on substantiating environmental claims

Published cosmetic-science and dermatology sources on SLS/SLES, 1,4-dioxane, parabens, and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives