SUSTAINABILITY, it seems, has developed quite a paintbox.
We have long had whitewashing, when uncomfortable facts receive a fresh coat of paint.
Then came greenwashing, when companies discovered that environmental virtue looks especially attractive in forest green.
We have since acquired bluewashing, pinkwashing, sportswashing, blackwashing and greenhushing, where organisations say less lest someone examine the shade too closely.
At this rate, environmental, social and governance (ESG) departments may need an interior designer.
But amid all this colouring, perhaps we are missing the point. Sustainability does not need greener stories or darker ones. It needs clearer ones.
For this reflection, two colours interest me most: green and black.
Greenwashing makes environmental performance look better than reality. Blackwashing, in the particular sense used by a group of conservation scientists, makes environmental harm look worse or more certain than the evidence supports.
One brightens the picture, the other darkens it. Both can begin with something true and end with something misleading.
Years ago, I came across a 2010 Biotropica paper led by conservation scientist Koh Lian Pin, now Professor Koh, Wash and Spin Cycle Threats to Tropical Biodiversity.
Its memorable argument was that corporate greenwashing and environmental blackwashing could both allow spin to outrun evidence.
The paper stayed in the back of my mind. After another round of recent environmental claims and corporate responses, I recently revisited it. Some papers age badly. This one has not.
Greenwashing begins at home
Palm oil cannot credibly call out blackwashing without acknowledging greenwashing at home. Otherwise, it is complaining about muddy boots while standing in its own puddle.
The Koh paper was not an industry defence. It challenged generous claims about oil palm plantations while also questioning exaggerated campaigning.
An oil palm plantation may contain conservation areas, riparian reserves and wildlife corridors and be managed much better than another plantation, but it is not tropical rainforest.
If someone unfairly paints every plantation black, the answer is not to reach for an oversized tin of green paint.
The corporate world has supplied more dramatic examples. Volkswagen’s “clean diesel” scandal remains one of the best known, where diesel vehicles marketed as environmentally friendly were equipped with illegal defeat devices designed to cheat emissions tests.
“Clean diesel” became one of the more expensive adjectives in corporate history.
A green label does not make something green, and neither a sustainability report nor a certification badge can confer sainthood. Evidence still has to do the heavy lifting.
Greenwashing does not always arrive wrapped in leaves and sustainability slogans. Sometimes it appears in a spreadsheet.
Plantation productivity is a good example. Crude palm oil (CPO) yield per hectare can broadly be derived from fresh fruit bunch (FFB) yield multiplied by the oil extraction rate (OER), provided the production boundaries match.
At 20 tonnes of FFB per hectare and 20% OER, that is about four tonnes of CPO per hectare.
Yet I have seen past presentations where kernel extraction rate (KER), is effectively added.
The number rises, but it is no longer strictly oil yield. KER measures palm kernel recovered, so the result is closer to a combined CPO-and-kernel palm product yield.
There is nothing wrong with that if clearly labelled. The problem begins when it is still presented as “oil yield”, making comparison with peers no longer apples to apples.
Productivity then appears to improve without another fruit bunch being harvested. Quite a feat of agronomy.
Cost of production is slipperier still. Cost of what, and measured where? Ex-estate FFB? Per tonne of crude palm oil? Before or after kernel credit? Including head-office overheads, depreciation, finance costs or foreign-exchange effects?
Two companies can both report a “cost of production” while measuring materially different things.
An analyst can then combine one interpretation of yield with another interpretation of cost and produce a beautifully precise margin comparison.
The calculator may be precise; the comparison may not be.
Before asking which company looks better, ask whether we are comparing apples with apples, or an apple polished for the analyst briefing. Not every mismatch is deception.
Sometimes it is loose definition. But when the audience is shareholders and markets, clarity should not be optional.
When black paint goes too far
Blackwashing is the less familiar half of the story, and I use the term here in the specific sense adopted by Koh and his co-authors, not as a label for every forceful environmental criticism.
Their paper quoted a non-governmental organisation’s (NGOs) claim that orangutans were predicted to become extinct as early as 2011.
The authors considered that timetable unrealistic while stressing that orangutan populations were declining through habitat loss and remained a serious conservation concern. That distinction matters.
The orangutan did not need exaggeration to deserve protection. When the cause is sound, an unsound number does not strengthen it; it gives sceptics ammunition.
I have long felt this in the palm oil debate because the orangutan became one of its most powerful symbols.
One photograph of a displaced orangutan can communicate in seconds what an industry presentation may fail to communicate after seventy slides and a buffet lunch.
That power can be useful because images can force industries to confront realities that statistics allowed them to ignore.
But precisely because the orangutan matters, claims made in its name should be careful. If a species is threatened, say so.
If habitat has been lost, measure it. If particular activities contributed, establish the relationship.
The conservation case is strong enough without stretching the evidence.
Blackwashing does not necessarily mean inventing something from nothing. More often, a genuine concern becomes darker or more certain than the evidence warrants. That is the trouble with half-truths: they contain enough truth to travel.
When maps, numbers and images become verdicts
Satellite technology has transformed fire detection, but it can also create an illusion of certainty.
A thermal alert inside or near a plantation boundary is a reason to investigate, not a complete explanation of what happened.
It may show where unusual heat was detected, but not where flames began, how they spread or who was responsible.
A useful discipline is to separate detection, association and causation: what happened, where it happened and who was responsible. Too often, the first two are mistaken for the third.
Maps are persuasive because they make messy landscapes look neat. Add a concession boundary and company name, and the story can appear settled before investigators reach the ground. Yet fires cross boundaries, peat can smoulder and reignite, and incidents may involve neighbouring land, accidents, deliberate burning or outside intrusion.
What appears neat on a screen can be much messier when boots finally reach the site.
Technology can narrow the search area; responsibility still requires investigation. None of this gives plantation operators an escape route.
A company should be able to show that prevention systems existed, patrols were functioning and fires were dealt with promptly. If negligence or deliberate burning is established, accountability must follow.
There is also a scale problem easily missed from afar. An estate is not a factory under one roof where cameras and supervisors can observe almost everything around the clock.
Plantations are vast open landscapes crossed by roads, drains, rivers and boundaries adjoining villages, forests and other holdings.
Take a 2,500ha estate. That is 25 sq km, roughly 3,500 football fields. A contiguous 20,000ha holding spans about 200 sq km, or nearly 28,000 fields. No management team can watch every corner around the clock.
For wider perspective, Kalimantan is roughly 67 times the size of Selangor.
That does not remove responsibility. Estates need patrols, fire towers, monitoring, firebreaks, water sources and rapid response, increasingly aided by drones and satellites.
But scale should temper the assumption that every incident within a mapped boundary was necessarily known, authorised or caused by management.
An estate may have a management office. Unfortunately, it does not come with a roof over the other 3,499 football fields.
Not every exaggerated number begins with sinister intent. Sometimes somebody simply mixes up the units. One hectare is about 2.47 acres, so confusing the two can make an area appear more than twice as large or small.
I have seen press reports stumble over that conversion, turning a unit error into a very different landscape.
Then there is punctuation. In common English notation, 1,000 means one thousand and 1.5 means one and a half.
In Dutch, a comma normally marks decimals, while a point may group thousands. Move figures between languages without noticing the convention and a report can acquire an entirely new landscape.
Sometimes exaggeration is strategy. Sometimes arithmetic is simply having a bad day.
Occasionally the controversy begins somewhere between the hectare, the acre and the comma.
Percentages are no safer. Are we talking about all concessions or selected ones? One district or an entire country? One month or ten years? Change the denominator and the narrative can change without changing the arithmetic.
Companies may choose flattering baselines, governments convenient comparisons, industry bodies favourable indicators, campaigners compelling findings, and journalists sharper headlines. The more dramatic the number, the more interested I become in the footnote.
The headline usually boards first; the methodology sometimes misses the flight.
Selective reporting does not require a false number. Sometimes it begins simply by shining the brightest light on one part of a much larger map.
Images can do much the same thing. A photograph of burning forest, an injured animal or a distressed community may reveal something an industry would rather remain unseen, but one image can also become shorthand for millions of hectares or an entire commodity.
Companies can perform the reverse trick. Photograph one beautiful conservation reserve, add a hornbill, sunrise and perhaps an employee planting a tree, and readers may assume the whole operation looks much the same.
One side selects the darkest corner, the other the greenest. Both photographs may be genuine. The distortion lies in pretending either represents the whole landscape.
The grey between
Arguing that greenwashing and blackwashing are both wrong does not mean they are equal in motive, scale or consequence.
A company destroying habitat and then misleading the public may be responsible for physical environmental damage as well as deceptive communication.
An NGO exaggerating that damage may cause reputational or informational harm and, in doing so, invite scrutiny of who funds it, what interests are involved and whether those relationships are transparently disclosed. The consequences are not necessarily equivalent.
Nor should “blackwashing” become an escape hatch through which companies avoid uncomfortable evidence.
If an environmental organisation produces rigorous evidence of deforestation, pollution or labour abuse, industry should answer the evidence, not complain about the colour of the messenger’s paintbrush. The principle is not equality of wrongdoing, but equality of evidential standards.
Greenwashing wants the picture greener than reality; blackwashing wants it darker.
Sustainability usually inhabits the inconvenient territory in between. Grey does not fit comfortably on a campaign poster or corporate brochure, yet grey contains reality.
A company can improve substantially and still have shortcomings. An NGO can expose a genuine problem while overstating part of its argument.
An agricultural industry can have environmental impacts while carrying enormous economic and social importance.
Two uncomfortable things can be true at once. Sometimes three. Agriculture rarely offers moral simplicity, and grey is not indecision. Sometimes it is simply the colour of evidence after all the paint has dried.
Industry needs watchdogs, watchdogs need evidence, campaigners need proportion, journalists need context and scientists need room for uncertainty. All of us occasionally need three difficult words: we were wrong.
If companies exaggerate environmental progress, correct them. If campaigners exaggerate environmental damage, correct that too.
If new evidence changes the picture, change the conclusion. Corrections should not travel in whispers when accusations travelled with a megaphone.
Revisiting Koh’s paper after all these years leaves me with a simple thought. In sustainability, everyone seems keen to improve the colour of the picture. Perhaps the wiser task is to improve the focus.
The world is complicated enough in its natural colours.
Joseph Tek Choon Yee has over 30 years of experience in the plantation industry, with a strong background in oil palm research and development, C-suite leadership and industry advocacy. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
