Greenwashing is a marketing method used by organizations or companies trying to show their willingness to pay special attention to the environmental issues even though their activities are actually not environmental-friendly at all.
In a wider sense, the term is used to stigmatize any communication effort or misinformation from a company, aiming at portraying the company as an environmental-friendly agent, or even to show a sustainable development strategy, even though its activities are contradictory and reprehensible, from an environmental and social standpoint (then it would be “social washing”, specifically when they pretend to leading an ambitious salaries policy or one that includes customers in the decision—making process).
Therefore, Greenwashing turns out to be a practice that has helped hijack the primary use of the term "sustainable development".
Greenwashing