Green Words That Should Go Extinct: 10 Terms That Annoy Us All
By Darby Burgett
Language shapes our reality. The words we use to describe environmental problems don’t just communicate ideas — they frame how we think about solutions, who bears responsibility, and what actions matter most. October 16th was Dictionary Day, and we are examining the worn-out vocabulary that has polluted our environmental discourse. These 10 terms have been so overused that we might want to dump them as a movement.
1. Sustainable
In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Around the same time, businesses began using sustainability as a “selling point”.
Today, the word sustainability is used everywhere, describing products from packaging to chocolate to vacations to fashion. The word has become a way for consumers to feel good about their purchases and for companies to claim that they are environmentally friendly.
The United Nations labels the tactic of communicating or claiming the sustainability attributes of a product or service in isolation of brand activities or meaningful action as one form of greenwashing. In other words, businesses these days can claim to be doing right by the planet when in fact they are doing nothing of the sort. Greenwashing is a deceptive marketing tactic that misleads the public to believe that a company is doing more to protect the environment than it actually is.
For example, McDonald’s introduced paper straws in 2019 to replace plastic straws, but it turned out that their paper straws were not non-recyclable. In 2021, a report from the Changing Markets Foundation studied the clothing industry, which is dominated by cheap fast fashion. They checked the sustainability claims of major high street brands and discovered that 60% of their overall claims were misleading. One brand in particular stood out: H&M. A staggering 96% of their claims did not stand up to interrogation and were found to be greenwashing.
IKEA was caught greenwashing by Earthsight in 2020 for accredited illegal logging. The company is the largest user of wood in the world but the investigation found that IKEA had been using illegally sourced wood from the forests of Ukraine’s Carpathian region, an area home to endangered beasts such as bears, lynxes, wolves, and bison to make beechwood chairs. This timber had actually been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
This is the illusion of sustainability without any action of sustainability. It promotes false solutions to the climate crisis that distract from and delay credible action.
2. Carbon Footprint
Contrary to how it sounds, the term “carbon footprint” is not actually based in environmental sciences.
In the early 2000s, BP, or British Petroleum, rebranded themselves with a $100+ million-per-year, multi-year marketing effort working with branding experts Landor & Associates and ad giant Ogilvy & Mather. It was a fully integrated PR push across print, TV, and digital, and introduced one of the world’s first prominent online carbon calculators. The company rebranded itself in the face of global warming to “Beyond Petroleum.”
While implying that BP was heavily invested in a fossil fuel free world that was “coming,” the campaign also shifted blame for climate change, making it every individual’s role to measure and manage their own greenhouse gas emissions. It moved the burden of climate change away from fossil fuel company responsibility to being ourresponsibility. And it worked. Academic research by Professor Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes found “carbon footprint” use in public discourse was minimal before BP’s campaign. Shortly after BP’s ads, the term became Oxford UK Word of the Year in 2007.
Personal choice alone will not mitigate climate action — it has to be at an industry level fight. During the COVID pandemic we saw just a 7% drop in greenhouse gas emissions despite massive lifestyle changes across the world: with roads empty and nobody flying. It was proof that collective individual reductions alone cannot solve the climate crisis without systemic fossil fuel phase-out. To make a difference our energy has to shift to renewable sources like solar, wind and geothermal. It is exactly why we designated 2025’s Earth Day theme as Our Power, Our Planet.
While personal choices certainly matter and collective individual action can drive change — for example, opting for solar panels on your roof, using an electric vehicle (EV), going vegan, and choosing not to fly — this framing deliberately obscures who bears the majority of responsibility for climate change. Between 1988 and 2022, just 100 companies have been responsible for 71 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In February 2025, BP announced it was slashing investment in renewable energy, like solar, in favor of fossil fuel investment to drive profits and investor confidence. We guess it is now BP — Back to Petroleum.
3. Green
The color has become synonymous with a sense of environmental goodness without requiring any specific impact. Thus, it is the perfect word for companies to use if they want to appear environmentally responsible without actually doing anything that makes a difference to the state of the planet.
In reality, there is no such thing as a green product. In fact, the United Nations identifies “green”’ as a misleading label that does not have a standard definition and can be easily misinterpreted. When everything can be green, nothing is — the word has become environmental camouflage, allowing harmful practices to hide in plain sight behind a reassuring hue.
4. Eco-Friendly
In theory, eco-friendly practices and products aim to reduce or eliminate environmentally harmful impacts, such as deforestation, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, or biodiversity loss.
In reality, the “eco-” prefix and “eco-friendly” label have been used on countless products with no demonstrable environmental benefits. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission advises that brands completely avoid broad terms like “eco-friendly” because these claims suggest environmental benefits and are nearly impossible to substantiate.
For example, in 2025 the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that UK company Lavazza misled consumers by claiming that their coffee pods were compostable “eco caps.” This marketing led consumers to believe that Lavazza’s capsules could be composted at home, when they could only be composted in an industrial setting.
The United Nations also identifies “eco-friendly” as a misleading label that does not have a standard definition and can be easily misinterpreted. When one of the world’s leading advisory agencies on environmental issues warns against using a specific term, it’s time to retire it from the environmental conversation entirely.
5. Net-Zero
“Net zero,” as defined by the United Nations, means cutting greenhouse gas emissions to a small amount of residual emissions that can be easily absorbed and stored by nature and other greehouse gas emission removal measures, leaving zero net emissions in the atmosphere, or the air we breathe.
The phrase “net- zero” sounds like a concrete commitment, a finite amount – a definitive finish line in the race against climate change doesn’t it?
But claiming your service or product or aim is to be net-zero means nothing without the appropriate plan that can be enacted for a company or even a country to achieve it, and therein lies the problem.
The Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, CCRM, concluded that the net-zero targets of 24 global corporations which sell themselves as “climate leaders” are misleading, exaggerated, or even down right false. For example, HSBC pledged it would be net-zero by 2030 while funneling billions into fossil fuel projects, misleading consumers on its true environmental impact.
They are not alone. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, FIFA, was reprimanded for falsely claiming the 2022 Qatar World Cup was carbon neutral. The Swiss advertising regulator, Swiss Fairness Commission,, ruled in 2023 that FIFA’s claim was “false and misleading” due to incomplete accounting of emissions and unreliable carbon offset practices. FIFA was subsequently ordered to stop making unsubstantiated environmental claims about the tournament.
Additionally, scientists warn that entire countries are getting net-zero wrong and using flawed carbon accounting to achieve it, — relying too heavily on trees and oceans, to absorb new carbon emissions. Yes, trees are carbon sinks, but they take decades of growing to sequester carbon. They are also vulnerable to wildfire, disease, and deforestation, which can release stored carbon back into the atmosphere. Offsets alone don’t reduce current emissions and depending on projected future carbon removals from nature allows companies and countries to
continue polluting right now with abandon, delaying real and urgent emission cuts.
Thus, the term has become a way for companies and countries to make promises for the future while continuing to pollute in the present, when action needs to be taken now.
6. Carbon-Neutral
Similar to net-zero, carbon-neutral allows companies to continue their harmful behavior under the guise of “offsetting” their impacts. Carbon-neutral requires that carbon dioxide output has a net neutral impact on the environment, that the same amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere is removed.
Just to be clear, because we are getting into word salad territory here, there is a difference between carbon neutral and net zero. The former means balancing out only the carbon dioxide a specific company or person releases by removing or offsetting the exact same amount elsewhere, such as buying carbon credits. It often focuses just on carbon dioxide emissions. Net zero is broader. It means balancing all greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide plus methane and nitrous oxide.
But carbon-neutral claims are difficult to substantiate or verify. The term allows corporations to treat carbon emissions like a debt that can be paid off with bought credits rather than a problem that needs to be eliminated at the source.
7. Recyclable
Just because something has the familiar three chasing arrows on it does not mean that it will be recycled. In fact, the chasing arrows are often plastered on products that aren’t recyclable at all. In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency described this use as “deceptive.”
Resin Identification Codes, created by the plastic industry, are the numbers 1 through 7 imprinted on the bottom of plastic products that indicate what type of plastic the material is made from. These numbers gave the illusion that there is a vast and viable recycling industry and infrastructure. In reality, 30 percent of number 1 and 2 plastics were recycled in 2022, numbers 3 through 7 are much more difficult to recycle, and numbers 6 and 7 are not financially feasible to recycle.
Fossil fuel companies have perpetuated the myth that recycling can solve the plastic crisis through their decades-long disinformation campaign. They spent millions to sell the idea that the majority of plastics could in fact be recycled, when the reality is that there is no economically viable way to recycle most plastics, a fact that fossil fuel companies knew. In 2019, the oil industry launched The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, a 1.5 billion dollar campaign that promoted recycling and clean up efforts, shifting the blame for plastic waste from the producer to the consumer.
The reality is this: the only way to end the plastics crisis is to reduce plastics consumption at the source. EARTHDAY.ORG is asking for a 60% reduction of plastic production by 2040.
8. Biodegradable
“Biodegradable” means that a product can be broken down by naturally occurring microorganisms, like bacteria or fungi, and turned into compounds found in nature, such as water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients that can safely re-enter the environment.
A 2020 survey found that 74 percent of shoppers were more likely to buy a product labeled biodegradable, showing how persuasive the term is. However, the label “biodegradable” means little without knowing when, where, and how the product actually breaks down. For example, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission found that ECM Biofilm’s claims that their plastic products would break down in approximately nine months to five years in nearly all landfills was not supported.
Materials made from PLA, polylactic acid which is a biodegradable plastic made from renewable plant sources like corn starch or sugarcane, require high heat and controlled humidity in commercial composting facilities to break down. Certain biodegradable plastics need very specific conditions and can take years to decompose if these are not met. Additionally, some so-called biodegradable plastics — particularly oxo-degradable types — can fragment into microplastics or leave toxic residues, causing further harm to ecosystems. While other materials, such as paper-based home compostables, can degrade easily but slowly at lower temperatures without any industrial processes.
This complexity highlights the need for transparency and better infrastructure to support true biodegradability because the dimension of time — whether something degrades in weeks or centuries, and the conditions needed to biodegrade at all — make all the difference. While the label “biodegradable” treats them as all the same.
9. Natural & Organic
The so-called ‘natural product industry’ was projected to hit nearly 320 billion dollars in value by 2024. But what exactly does ‘natural’ mean? The answer is almost nothing.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines natural products as those with no artificial ingredients and only minimal processing. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says food labeled natural should have nothing artificial added to it. But these standards are incredibly vague and leave enormous room for interpretation and manipulation.
Food labelled as natural isn’t necessarily healthy. For example, according to the standards of both agencies, meat that was produced using hormones and antibiotics is still considered natural.Sugar cane and animal fat are both natural substances, but that label does not imply they are healthy choices. Worse, companies know that the term natural implies healthy, and additive-free food, even when this is not necessarily true. The term preys on the implication that these products come from nature, and are therefore good for us and the planet.
Additionally, organic does not mean pesticide-free in the U.S. On that note, the Trump administration is trying to make agricultural chemical companies less accountable by granting pesticide manufacturers broad legal immunity, so that they are not held to account if their products hurt us, even when their products do cause harm. You can speak out by writing to strongly oppose Section 453 of the Interior Appropriations Bill.
10. BPA-Free
BPA stands for bisphenol A, a chemical primarily used in the manufacture of plastics that has been linked to endocrine disruption and various other serious health concerns. You can read more on BPa and other plastic chemicals in the Babies VS. Plastics report.
Public opposition to the chemical has led to “BPA-free” products and a global push to reduce usage of BPA. However, the chemical makeup of other compounds used in their place known as BPA-substitudes — bisphenol S (BPS), bisphenol F (BFB), bisphenol AF (BFAP) — aren’t that different from BPA. In fact, research suggests that BPS in food is more harmful than BPA. Thus, BPA-free does not mean better — it just means the label tells you what’s absent, not what harm remains.
Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say
Words matter in the environmental movement because they shape policy, influence consumer behavior, and determine which issues receive attention. The terms we shared with you sound like solutions, but are all open to manipulation, while enabling the status quo.
This Dictionary Day, let’s demand the use of specific, measurable, and verifiable claims instead of vague platitudes that mean everything and nothing. The climate crisis is too urgent for linguistic camouflage — we need to use words that illuminate the truth, not obscure it.
This article is available for republishing on your website, newsletter, magazine, newspaper, or blog. The accompanying imagery is cleared for use with attribution. Please ensure that the author’s name and their affiliation with EARTHDAY.ORG are credited. Kindly inform us if you republish so we can acknowledge, tag, or repost your content. You may notify us via email at davies@earthday.org or fielder@earthday.org.