PickupPal Blog

Greenwashing is a phrase that describes the act of pretending to be green just to look good. Greenwashing companies miss-lead consumers about the benefits of their brands, products and services. Generally, they will accentuate minor green attributes whilst downplaying bigger, environmentally damaging effects.

The practice of greenwashing is absolutely rife, most brand-name products are guilty. This is because green, eco-friendly and environmentally conscious ideas sell more units.

It’s fantastic that green issues are now front page news and part of public debate, but unfortunately this also means that companies are cashing-in on this valuable marketing spin.

My fear is not that people will stop talking about climate change. My fear is that they will talk us to Kingdom Come. ( Source: Monbiot )

It could be dubious claims of sustainability, clever use of terms like “green”, “eco”, “organic” or simply excessive use of the colour green. My own personal favourite is British Petroleums re-brand in 2000. At the time I remember thinking how blatant, but at the same time how powerful the effect is. Here is an oil company, the antithesis of green living, assuming the green guise with this bold sun flower logo.

British Petroleum: a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Environmental marketing agency TerraChoice recently published the 6 sins of greenwashing:

1. Sin of the Hidden Trade-Off
   e.g. paper (including household tissue, paper towel and copy paper): “Okay, this product comes from a sustainably harvested forest, but what are the impacts of its milling and transportation? Is the manufacturer also trying to reduce those impacts?” Emphasizing one environmental issue isn’t a problem (indeed, it often makes for better communications). The problem arises when hiding a trade-off between environmental issues.
2. Sin of No Proof
   e.g. Personal care products (such as shampoos and conditioners) that claim not to have been tested on animals, but offer no evidence or certification of this claim. Company websites, third-party certifiers, and toll-free phone numbers are easy and effective means of delivering proof.
3. Sin of Vagueness
   e.g. Garden insecticides promoted as “chemical-free.” In fact, nothing is free of chemicals. Water is a chemical. All plants, animals, and humans are made of chemicals as are all of our products. If the marketing claim doesn’t explain itself (“here’s what we mean by ‘eco’ …”), the claim is vague and meaningless. Similarly, watch for other popular vague green terms: “non-toxic”, “all-natural”, “environmentally-friendly”, and “earth-friendly.”
4. Sin of Irrelevance
   e.g. CFC-free oven cleaners, CFC free shaving gels, CFC-free window cleaners, CFC-disinfectants. Could all of the other products in this category make the same claim? The most common example is easy to detect: Don’t be impressed by CFC-free! Ask if the claim is important and relevant to the product. (If a light bulb claimed water efficiency benefits you should be suspicious.) Comparison-shop (and ask the competitive vendors)
5. Sin of Fibbing
   e.g. Shampoos that claims to be “certified organic”, but for which our research could find no such certification. When I check up on it, is the claim true? The most frequent examples in this study were false uses of third-party certifications. Thankfully, these are easy to confirm. Legitimate third-party certifiers – EcoLogoCM, Chlorine Free Products Association (CFPA), Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Green Guard, Green Seal (for example) – all maintain publicly available lists of certified products. Some even maintain fraud advisories for products that are falsely claiming certification.
6. Sin of the Lesser of Two Evils
   e.g. Organic tobacco. “Green” insecticides and herbicides.
   Is the claim trying to make consumers feel ‘green’ about a product category that is of questionable environmental benefit? Consumers concerned about the pollution associated with cigarettes would be better served by quitting smoking than by buying organic cigarettes. Similarly, consumers concerned about the human health and environmental risks of excessive use of lawn chemicals might create a bigger environmental benefit by reducing their use than by looking for greener alternatives.



At PickupPal we’re very careful to manage the ecological benefits of our product. Fundamentally, our product can improve air quality and have an impact on CO2 emissions, but we need the help of our community to do this. As a company we work in a paper-less and office-less fashion, using technology to reduce our burden on the environment and when the team needs to meet face-to-face we do so in shared meeting spaces.

Nevertheless, our product does come under some criticism. This normally centers around the 7% fee that we charge to Drivers for using our website. We came up with this as a way to pay for and maintain our service, but in an effort to make our service as accessible as possible we’ve decided to abandon the 7% fee, making our website completely FREE for everyone to use. There will be an official announcement on this shortly, but I mention to here to further illustrate our commitment to building a product that is serious about green-issues.

- Jonathan

NOTE: This is not groundbreaking news however it is pretty funny.

I mentioned in a post a few weeks ago that PickupPal will be providing Ridesharing services for Virgin Festival Canada 2008 by Virgin Mobile in Calgary but we are also going to have a booth at the Eco-Village on site. As soon as it was decided to have the booth John Stewart, (CEO and co-founder of PickupPal), recalled that he had a display booth at his Brother’s office in Kingston. The challenge was, when was John going to come down to Ottawa some 3 hours away and drop off the booth?

We talked about going down to pick it up or possibly having it shipped but that was going to be a big hassle. Then it dawned on John – Ummm don’t we run a company that has the mantra “a global eco-friendly transportation revolution that connects drivers, passengers, and PACKAGES with the places they need to go”? Well after we laughed for a while John posted the Pickup request and sure enough the call was answered within hours and the display booth arrived safe and sound in Ottawa – right to my doorstep - safe and sound.

So the moral of this story is even if you don’t remember to use PickupPal all the time, don’t feel bad, we forget sometimes as well. I think it is because we are so conditioned to do things the old way that we sometimes forget that we now have more options available to us right under our noses!

Cheers - Eric

You may not realize this, but PickupPal also has a Facebook Application!

For those with a Facebook account you can install it from the PickupPal Facebook App About Page.

For those that have thus far avoided this social network giant, a Facebook Application is like a mini website that lives inside the Facebook website. PickupPal designed and coded these pages and we control the content and the way these pages behave. You can get more detailed technical information on the Facebook Platform here.

So, what does it do?

Currently there are two main pages within the application:

• Stats
• Invite Friends

The Stats page will display your mileage and your CO2 emissions reductions, so all your friends will be able to see how much you’ve contributed to the environment. We hope that this will encourage other Facebookers to follow your good example.

The Invite Friends page allows you to invite your friends and spread the PickupPal message; for every friend you invite that successfully signs-up to the PickupPal site we credit your account with $5.

How can I use my Facebook Application to make requests and create routes?

Right now, you can’t…

We’ve had to keep our application as simple as possible because the Facebook App Platform is prone to server delays, which can seriously impede the experience of using the application pages. To use the core features of PickupPal, you will need to jump on over to the main site.

You’re paying us to recruit for you?

Exactly! The PickupPal Facebook Application lets your friends discover how eco-conscious you are and credits your PickupPal account with $5 for every person you successfully recruit!

- Jonathan

Every day at PickupPal we spend a considerable amount of advertising budget on Pay Per Click. PPC is cost-effective, highly-targeted and easy to track; so we know we’re advertising to the right people and every time someone signs-up from a PPC advert, we know exactly how much that costs us.

PPC is a fantastic driver of user sign-ups that helps us continually add to the ever-expanding pool of PickupPal users - or PuPs, as they’re affectionately known.

Our main PPC vendors are Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook and some smaller advertising companies, but it’s from Facebook that we get the seriously high-volume stream of traffic. Facebook users really seem to love PickupPal!

We enjoy unprecedented volumes of traffic that readily converts into PuP sign-ups. This conversion rate is a really important number for us, as it tells how compelling our advertising and product is.

It’s a measure of the amount of user sign-ups we get over the amount of users that clicked on an ad. For example: if we had 100 people click on one of our ads, but only 10 of these actually sign-up, our conversion rate would be 10%.

10 sign-ups / 100 clicks = 10% conversion rate

So far, our conversion rate has been very encouraging and we regularly see 1 in 5 people signing-up. A 20% conversion rate is very high for PPC, and we’re happy that we’re building a product that is so easy to market to people.

As the guy in charge of Search Engine Marketing at PickupPal I’ll soon be posting more detailed articles here about PPC and our other marketing efforts and maybe going into more detail as to what caused the sign-up spike you see in the above image. In the meantime, if there’s anything else you would like to know, feel free to use the comments below, or email me at jonathan@pickuppal.com.