Beside the door leading into Prentiss Dining Hall there is a round “Green Seal” sticker. A “Green Seal” sticker is a sign that a building in the Walla Walla community has taken extra steps to reduce pollution and manage waste in an environmentally concerned manner.

The “Green” certification, however, lacks meaning in an age in which consumers are inundated with phrases like “certified organic,” “eco-friendly,” “Energy Star certified” and “green.” FDA regulations on such phrases are vague if present at all. This business practice is known as “greenwashing,” a tactic involving cultivation of a false or incomplete image of how environmentally friendly their product is.

The following is a list of seven products and companies whose greenwashing is particularly notable.

Big Business Organic: Large organic companies get organic food globally, increasing the company’s carbon footprint. Some of the milk in Stonyfield Farm’s yogurt comes from New Zealand. It is dehydrated, flown 9,000 miles and rehydrated at the company’s plant in New Hampshire. The company also receives various fruits from China, Turkey and Ecuador.

American Car Advertisements: SUVs sit in nature, while birds chirp and bears sniff around the tail pipe. Car advertisers are excellent at portraying the image that something is green without ever saying it, or being it.

Fashion Magazines: Vanity Fair and Elle had their first ever green issues this last year. Both Vogue and London Fashion Week have done spreads of environmentally conscious clothing. Yet these same magazines can contain over 600 pages and often have more than 450 advertisement pages.

General Electric: GE has been famous nationally for polluting the Hudson River with toxic chemicals and locally for their environmentally harmful running of the Hanford Nuclear Plant. However, their crisp advertisements about coal miners and their promises to reduce their emissions by 2012 may change their image, but not their initiative.

Hybrid Cars: Despite increased fuel efficiency, nickel is contained within a hybrid battery. Nickel mining is considered environmentally harmful, as it causes acid rain. Also, to create a Toyota Prius battery, nickel is shipped from the mine in Canada to Europe, then China and then Japan, creating a considerable carbon footprint. Still, Hybrid cars have been successfully marketed by the auto industry as a “solution” to their section of the pollution pie chart.

Clorox Bleach: Clorox has long marketed bleach as a safe household product. Clorox recently purchased Burt’s Bees, a natural body care company with policies for fair trade and against animal testing. This accompanies Clorox’s Green Works products, which are supposedly completely ‘natural,’ a term that isn’t regulated by FDA. Dangerous substances such as arsenic are considered completely natural.

Oil Companies: BP’s commercials have cartoon babies driving in green cars and stopping to refuel at green gas stations. BP has even changed the colors in its logo to light and dark green. Chevron’s advertisements of late look eerily similar to a documentary about the dangers of using oil.