Seeing Through the Green: A Systems Study of Greenwashing

Greenwashing is usually discussed as a problem of individual lies: a false label, an inflated claim, an advert pulled by a regulator. This paper argues that it is better understood as a property of a system. Brands, buyers, regulators, certifiers and the media are bound together by incentives that make green claims cheap to make and costly to check. Evidence from regulators supports this reading. A European Commission study found that 53.3% of environmental claims examined were vague, misleading or unfounded, and an international sweep of 1,095 websites led by the UK and Dutch competition authorities found that about four in ten appeared to use potentially misleading tactics. The project applied systems-oriented design to this problem. It combined giga-mapping, an iceberg analysis, a causal loop map and an in-depth case study of IKEA's timber supply chain to locate where greenwashing is produced and where it can be interrupted. The insight that emerged was that the decisive gap lies between what a product claims on its surface and what it is made of underneath, and that consumers are rarely given the means to look. The project's response was Earthyeats, a fictional brand of paper cutlery whose brochure works as a provocative artefact. Its cover sells eco-friendly tableware; its inner pages peel the product apart to reveal the polyethylene layer that most paper cups and plates carry. Copies were placed among magazines in library racks and read by students who did not know it was a provocation. The paper reports the research, the maps and the artefact, and proposes a stronger second life for the deliverable: Peel Back, an open, low-cost provocation kit for classrooms, consumer groups and retailers. The kit pairs the deceptive brochure with a five-question claim check based on India's 2024 greenwashing guidelines, so that the moment of surprise becomes a lasting habit of scrutiny.