The Dutch Advertising Code Committee has chastised KLM Royal Dutch
Airlines for what it’s calling a misleading sustainability claim in a recent
ad.
According to
Bloomberg,
the watchdog group concluded the ad tagline — “Be a hero, fly CO2 zero” — is an
absolute claim that the airline cannot prove.
In 2019, KLM launched its “Fly Responsibly”
campaign
— which challenged individual travelers and the aviation industry as a whole to
work together to create a more sustainable future for aviation. As part of the
effort, KLM offered its fellow airlines free use of its
CO2Zero
carbon-offset program — which contributes to reforestation efforts in
Panama. The new ad’s tagline seems to play on the name of the program; but
without further explanation, it does imply that flying with KLM can be free of
carbon emissions — according to Bloomberg, the watchdog group said KLM’s
approach results in a certain “level of offsetting” of emissions but is not
“adequate” to claim absolute carbon neutrality.
While the ruling is limited to KLM, it touches on industrywide pressure for
airlines to lower their carbon
footprint
and ‘flight-shaming’
campaigns
to get people to fly less. Commercially viable alternatives such as sustainable
aviation
fuels
and electric and hydrogen-powered
planes
are at least a decade away; so, carriers are relying on measures such as carbon
offsetting to reduce their impact — and while validation
efforts
for offsets are improving, Bloomberg points out they’re still widely criticized
as insufficient to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere to the extent needed to
avert climate
catastrophe.
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Other European carriers appealing to travelers’ growing interest in more
sustainable travel options include Lufthansa, which has been
touting
a “fly CO2 neutral” program that “enables passengers to keep an eye on their
travel activities and to compensate for the CO2 emissions inevitably caused by
their flight;” and EasyJet, which says it has been
offsetting carbon emissions from
fuel used on all flights across its network since November 2019. Here in the
US, Alaska,
Delta
and
JetBlue
are leading industrywide sustainability efforts.
According to Bloomberg, the case was brought by an individual under the
Stichting Reclame Code — a self-regulatory
system for advertisers in the Netherlands that also has consumer representation.
KLM has two weeks to decide whether it wants to appeal.
With the added pressure on companies from a variety of stakeholders to rein in their environmental impacts is a decreased tolerance for empty or inflated brand claims on that front (especially in the UK) — as sustainable beverage darlings including Oatly and Innocent drinks have both recently been reminded. And this isn’t the first time KLM has been called out for greenwashing — in 2020, the Dutch Advertising Code Committee confronted the airline for inflated claims regarding its use of biofuels.
We’re seeing more ambitious corporate climate commitments than ever; and, since
climate action is now largely considered a business
imperative,
the deluge isn’t likely to let up soon. With that is an ever-growing cache of
jargon and buzz speak, much of which is being thrown around without substantive
language and action to back it up. We at SB and our global community are
working to make sure that companies making these pledges have the knowledge and
resources
they need to ensure they’re proceeding with
integrity
and not biting off more than they can feasibly
chew
— but there is still a huge learning curve, even for companies that have led in
the sustainability space; and the devil is always in the
details.
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Sustainable Brands Staff
Published Apr 18, 2022 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST