Greenwashing occurs when environmental intention is given without clarity and transparent sustainable practices in place.
If you’re in-tune with current marketing practices, with any big name brand, or local shop in your neighbourhood, you’ll be familiar with the push towards letting you know, behind a company, comes an eco-conscious ideal.
Sustainability and ethical practices are buzzwords in marketing, and it can be extremely difficult to suss out what brands and companies are actually environmentally conscious and socially responsible.
This brings us to the crux of the matter - ideas used as tools to create desire, without true accountability. Unfortunately, this means a lot of greenwashing goes on. So…
What exactly is Greenwashing?
Greenwashing typically involves using misleading claims, labels, or imagery to create a positive environmental perception, often without substantiated evidence or genuine efforts towards sustainability. The intention is to capitalise on consumer interest in environmentally friendly products and gain a competitive edge in the market.
The biggest culprit is the use of vague or unsubstantiated statements about their stance, and the use of generic terms such as "green," "eco-friendly," or "sustainable" without clear definitions or supporting explanation and evidence.
It’s this lack of transparency that, at Avila Vara, we are trying to work our way through as a company. We are not perfect, but we can, and do substantiate every element of our production process and our ethos as a company.
Greenwashing has a lot to do with a lack of transparency, meaning things seem copacetic, when in fact claims made about environmental positive choices remain just that, claims and not much more.
For example, At Avila Vara, we use strictly lab grown diamonds. On the face of it, we could call it ‘job done’, because lab diamonds are generally considered by consumers to be the most sustainable and environmentally conscious choice compared to mined diamonds. We could count on some consumers simply ‘taking our word for it’ and leave it at that. Many, many jewellery companies talk about setting their jewellery with lab grown diamonds, but very few companies discuss how they source these diamonds and how their diamonds are actually produced. If we left it at 'job done' this would be an example of greenwashing, in that there would be a lack of substantiation and clarity as to how and if the lab diamonds sourced were ethical, eco-conscious and sustainable.
To that end, there can be major environmental costs in the production of lab grown diamonds, equal to and worse than environmental costs of some mined diamonds, it sounds strange but it is true. There are often truly questionable practices at play in the manufacturing of lab diamonds at facilities that are exploitative and unethical to their workers. So, being transparent means being mindful and really knowing where your jeweller sources their lab diamonds and really understanding their origin and carbon footprint. If lab grown diamonds are denoted as ‘sustainable’ but no information on production and sourcing is provided, this is an example of greenwashing.
At Avila Vara, this attention to responsible sourcing and verifiable eco-conscious production of our diamonds is elemental to our concept of value in the luxury jewellery space. We champion the intrinsic worth that is captured by how much a diamond can exemplify our ideals of the 5’th and 6’th C’s, “Culture” and “Care”. Avila Vara diamonds are sustainable as well as socially responsible, because they are grown, cut and produced by a company that places human values and environmental values as paramount to their vision of the diamond trade.
Our single supplier, Madestones, is a carbon neutral company, and has multiple growing facilities and cutting facilities in India. Each and every one of these facilities has undergone rigorous outside audits ensuring they are engaging in truly ethical and environmental practices in every element of production and delivery. Even the water that workers wash their hands in is checked for safety and purity. We look forward to publishing a one-on-one interview with the founder of Madestones to ask him what it means to truly engage in actionable eco-conscious practices, ethical sourcing and be a carbon neutral diamond company. Please stay tuned, we'll be posting this soon!