Conventional marketing is about strong, simple claims like ‘cheapest’, ‘fastest’ and ‘biggest’. That’s why it is very tempting for marketers to come up with single benefit claims about a product and the environment.

Imagine you want to buy a T-shirt based on the best environmental performance. Three ‘green’ brands all make different claims:

1. 100% organic cotton
2. 100% natural dyes
3. Carbon neutral

So which one would you choose?

The only way to know which T shirt is the best is to look at the LCA results where all these factors can be measured up and compared. The best T-Shirt may well be one that doesn’t make any ‘100%’ claims, but is carefully sourced, manufactured and shipped to minimise its environmental footprint at all stages of its life.

Recyclable: One of the most misused terms. Many materials are technically able to be recycled but it is not always economically viable to do so. Will the material actually be recycled? Other grey areas include:

• ‘down-cycling’ where the second use is of lower value – glass, for example, is usually ‘recycled’ into aggregate for roads, not new glass
• energy from waste is sometimes described as ‘recycling’ but in fact means burning the waste to recover some of the energy

Recycled content: Industrial manufacturing waste is routinely swept up and recycled in many industries. For example, printers often put paper trimmings straight back into the pulping process. Much more significant is the use of post consumer waste in products because this avoids disposal to landfill.

Post-consumer recycled content: Should refer only to material previously used by consumers and recovered after use.

Here we go. So these are some definitions:

Carbon offset: The controversial concept of paying others to reduce their carbon emissions to balance your emissions. Usually arranged by intermediaries and involving projects ranging from changing light bulbs to replacing fossil fuels with renewable power. Find out which project you’ll be supporting and beware of double counting.

Carbon neutral: Offsetting precisely as much carbon as you emit. The scope of operations covered by the claim is a critical factor – is the whole life-cycle of the product covered or just its manufacture?

Carbon negative: Offsetting more carbon than you emit. Sounds saintly but owes more to marketing than science.

Low carbon: Meaningless without numbers. How low is low?

This is our offset strategy in Europe.

We see offsets as the very last step in our climate change strategy after Avoid, Reduce and Replace. Since around 70% of our products’ carbon footprint is related to the use of raw materials, we think making claims based on our 10% direct carbon footprint is misleading. For this reason, we do not make corporate carbon neutrality claims. We mainly focus on products’ entire lifecycles. When we make carbon offsets we account for the emissions at all stages of the lifecycle of our products, not just emissions from our operations. We have reduced the carbon footprint of our portfolio by around 40% in the last few years. Through our Cool Carpet® programme, we offset the remaining emissions using carbon offsetting programmes. These enable us to balance emissions from our operations by investing in projects that reduce emissions in other parts of the world. All these projects are certified according to the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) and comply with the additionally principle.