From Coca Cola facing a lawsuit with their sugar filled “vitaminwater” to British Petroleum tripling its advertising after the Gulf disaster, the use of false sustainability claims remains commonplace in the North American market today.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently revising its Green Guides in an effort to help business better “align their product claims with consumer expectations”.

The FTC will accept public commentary on the Green Guides until December 10, 2010. U.S. designers, and some Canadian designers and ad agencies, have a vested interest in the final results and so the communication industry has been proactive on this call for input.

Tweetchat about the Green Guides

Together with the Living Principles, sustainable communication guru Don Carli will host a live conversation on Twitter on Friday November 12 from 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM EST. Don will be answering questions and inviting comments about the Green Guides in a tweetchat. A tweetchat is a live conversation where participants add a designated hashtag to their tweets, and follow all tweets with that hashtag.

You can join by going to the room that they have set up at Savorchat.com, http://www.savorchat.com/chat/lpfordesign-green-guide-chat, or follow and submit tweets on another Twitter platform using this hashtag: #LPchat.

Read Don Carli's article, Design, Green Marketing and Greenwashing: How Proposed Changes to the FTC’s “Green Guides” Can Impact You posted on the Living Principles website.

Canada’s Green Guides

In Canada, we have the Competition Act which, when violated, imposes penalties on and hands out convictions for offenses such as untruthful advertising and labelling.

We are inundated these days with terms such as “natural”, “local”, “green”, and “friendly”. With sustainable claims being so overused these days, do you think governments are doing a good job in preventing false and misleading claims?

For that matter, do we really even know what the technical definitions of these terms are?