Greenwashing is the practice of making an organization or product appear more environmental friendly than it is.

Because measuring the exact environmental impact of goods and services is extremely complex, some greenwashing might be involuntary, the result of a honest mistake. However, in other cases, greenwashing is the result of downright disingenuous thinking. In either case, one might argue that it is an organization's responsibility to represent correctly its environmental impact.

As consumer's, employee's and other stakeholder's interest grows for environmentally friendly goods and services, there is added pressure on organizations to communicate the environmental merits—real or not—of their products. As a result, it appears that greenwashing is widely pervasive in some markets; for instance, a 2009 analysis by a Canadian consultancy found seven ways in which an organization can mis-represent the environmental friendliness of products and found that 98% of the products it tested were mis-represented in at least one way.