March 12, 2026
Paper-based industries challenge misleading claims while reframing the sustainability message
Consumers need options, but they can’t make the right choices if they’re being misled about the facts.
That’s why the paper industry is pushing back against greenwashing by companies and agencies using unsubstantiated claims of deforestation and wasted resources to entice consumers into choosing digital communications—in other words, to “go paperless.”
“Greenwashing is the No. 1 influencer on consumer choice when it comes to paper,” says Jules Van Sant, executive director of Two Sides North America. “Those messages that push people to go paperless, when they say it’s better for the environment or saves trees without verifiable data to support the claim, that gets into the consumer perception that we are damaging the environment through using paper. That is not true, and that is greenwashing.”
In the meantime, paper-based industries have a role in embracing sustainability as a business advantage and educating consumers on paper as a renewable resource and a valuable feedstock for recycled products and materials.
“Business has the keys to create the changes we need to see and gain the most from,” says Jasper Steinhausen, founder and CEO of Business With Impact and author of the best-selling Making Sustainability Profitable. “The green transition is the biggest business opportunity of our time, rivaled only by AI.”
What Is Greenwashing?
In an age when buyers and customers demand eco-friendliness in their products and services, greenwashing is the practice of deceiving them with misleading, unsubstantiated, or even intentionally false claims.
In the United States, the Federal Transportation Commission’s (FTC’s) Green Guides, last updated in 2012, set the “truth in advertising” parameters for sustainability claims. The guides establish general principles of marketing claims, how consumers interpret environmental claims and how marketers can substantiate them, and how marketers can qualify their claims to avoid deceiving consumers.
The FTC’s list of civil cases filed with charges of greenwashing includes businesses in retail, paint, automaking (that was the Volkswagen emissions-falsifying case), and other industries. In the media and on environmental watchdog websites, big names in coffee, air travel, insurance, oil, and tech have been accused of greenwashing the climate impact or recyclability of their products, packaging, or practices.
Despite the intricacies of sustainability, avoiding charges of greenwashing comes down to a simple rule, says Steinhausen. “Do what you say and say what you do, and be able to back it with data. Be
super specific.”
In Europe, greenwashing breaks marketing laws. “You cannot lie, and you cannot lie about sustainability credentials,” he says.
In the U.S., the concepts are “basically the same. If you lie about what your business is capable of doing, it’s risky. It’s not good marketing. It’s not good ethics,” Steinhausen adds.
The go-paperless movement deceives consumers into believing that choosing electronic billing and communications saves trees—neglecting to disclose the environmental and economic benefits of the forestry industry and the renewability of trees. “We plant more trees than we harvest,” says Van Sant. “It’s an important part of our ecosystem and the environmental story we have in North America.”
The global picture of sustainable forestry has “evolved quite a bit,” she says, and in North America, especially, “paper has a really good story to tell, from the forestry all the way through the manufacturing and the recovery and recycling materials.”
Two Sides is an international consortium of organizations in the graphic communications and paper-based packaging sectors that researches and advocates for the sustainability story of paper-based products.
When businesses and government agencies are found making false go-
paperless claims, perhaps for the cost-savings created by communicating electronically, Two Sides North America approaches them for corrections. One well-known insurance company that Two Sides contacted required customers to opt in for paper communications, making digital communications the default option.
Largely through certified letters to legal offices, Two Sides North America exceeded its goal of changing at least 25 messages in 2025. Since its founding in 2011, Two Sides has engaged with about 400 companies to change or remove misleading claims, says Van Sant. “From a marketing standpoint, there has to be truth in what they’re saying,” she says. “That is what we’re tapping into when we reach out. We are asking you to change your messaging.”
Greenwashing can infiltrate marketing claims when leadership lacks a true commitment to sustainability, says Steinhausen. Most leaders, he says, “overlook the connection between sustainability and business, assuming that it is costly and demands compromise, but they know there could be a marketing gain.”
“Greenwashing is a typical sign that leadership doesn’t understand what sustainability is capable of, so then it becomes a tool for marketing,” he adds.
Telling the Paper Story
As greenwashing surges, the corrugated and other paper-based industries could do themselves a favor against competing packaging, such as flexible shipping bags, by printing its story on its boxes, mailers, and other products, Van Sant says. “We need to be forward on our packaging, on our boxes, stating very clearly that this is recyclable, and you are doing the environment good,” she says.
QR codes can direct consumers to the full story of forests replanted and facts about corrugated, including the powerful fact that it can be reused multiple times to make new products. Boxmakers could also work with their brands to educate consumers about sustainability and recycling, using packaging, mailers, and other avenues, she says.
Two Sides North America is playing its part by taking up the research from the former Paper + Packaging Board with its direct-to-consumer Love Paper campaign (www.lovepaperna.org). With “page-turning” facts on paper’s economic and environmental impact, the campaign reminds consumers that at least 60% of paper and paper-based packaging was recovered for recycling in 2024, and the recycling rate for corrugated was about 70%.
“It continues to get better,” Van Sant says, adding that the paper industry’s ongoing support for development of recycling systems has been part of the success story.
Plus, the letters, mailers, and inserts not produced or circulated due to go-paperless claims deplete the supply of recycled content needed to fuel production of corrugated products. “If we start to see a diminished demand, we have a diminished supply,” Van Sant says. “We want to keep the demand up so we can continue this cycle of forestry into harvesting into production into recycling.”
Greenhushing and Other Greenwashing Variants
Greenwashing appears to be “increasingly sophisticated,” the environmental monitor Planet Tracker said in its 2023 report, The Greenwashing Hydra. Greenwashing has split into six forms, undermining the transition to a green economy fueled, in part, by the sustainable investment fund sector.
The types of greenwashing are:
- Greencrowding: groups, businesses, and agencies hide within organizations ostensibly promoting sustainability.
- Greenlighting: diverting attention from environmentally damaging practices by spotlighting a particularly green feature of operations or products.
- Greenshifting: implying that the consumer is at fault and shifting the blame to them.
- Greenlabeling: This is the commonly understood meaning of greenwashing, when companies make misleading or partially misleading claims about their packaging, products, and services. Users often rely on ill-defined or hard-to-implement terms, including “recycled content,” “biodegradable,” and “compostable.”
- Greenrinsing: changing environmental goals before they are achieved, constantly pushing targets for such goals as net zero farther into the future.
- Greenhushing: underreporting or hiding sustainability credentials as a way to evade investor scrutiny. As a sophisticated form of greenwashing, companies that greenhush “may be trying to gain a green valuation uplift without subjecting themselves to proper investor scrutiny by suggesting that the company’s sustainability performance is stronger than its official pronouncements suggest.”
Companies that fear being accused of not doing enough for sustainability might engage in greenhushing, says Steinhausen. “People are afraid of having to be perfect and therefore don’t talk about the good stuff they actually do,” he says. “You can do all the right things in the world, but if nobody knows, you look like you do nothing, so there’s a high risk to greenhushing.”
Transparency about goals helps avert charges of greenhushing, says Steinhausen. He recommends that businesses prioritize their targets, making it clear which are getting attention and making progress, and which are slated for future action. “You tell people from the get-go, ‘I’m not perfect, but I have an interesting and appealing and meaningful mission,’” he says.
When one sector or business lobs unproven claims about the sustainability of another, such as go-paperless messaging, proactive messaging is easier to produce and manage than reactive defenses, Steinhausen adds.
“It’s a lot harder to try to stop something once it’s out there,” he says. “You can do all the disclaimers, and the people who started it can say they’re wrong, but nobody sees that. It disappears somewhere on page 75 on Google.”
Strategic Approach
As the corrugated industry knows, greenwashing can encompass competitors or unrelated industries misrepresenting the sustainability of paper-based products.
Targets of those claims should manage their responses strategically, says Steinhausen, who suggested that the choices are to “combat it, discourage it, or innovate and move ahead of the game and be better than them.”
“What’s the smarter way to go?” he says. “What type of leader am I? Do I engage in this effort, or do I simply move away and elevate my game even more? Maybe I’ll say that I’ll go ahead and beat you anyway because I have a better product, and I’ll take this as my call to improve even more.”
A common misconception in business says that sustainability demands compromise, while in reality, “there’s so much opportunity to create far better solutions and be far more efficient, more innovative, better run, and better serving through this way of working,” Steinhausen says. “If you want to be more competitive, you should focus more on this, because there is a direct correlation between your use of resources and sustainability.”
Sustainability as a corporate commitment has ebbed and flowed but seems to be rising, Van Sant says. Young adults say that sustainability matters to them. Two Sides North America’s research has found that 18- to 24-year-olds want a choice, “and they want paper, because they’re digital natives,” says Van Sant. “It isn’t a shiny thing to them. This younger generation wants to read books. They like their packaging to be cool. They want that unboxing experience.”
And, she adds, “print is trusted,” especially against the backdrop of digital clutter and dubious AI creations. “If it’s printed on a box, you trust it,” she says. “There is a higher level of trust, and I think you’re going to see this rise among consumers.
Claims about the recyclability of electronics are “squishy at best,” says Van Sant. “The environmental damage and the waste, let alone the mining to create them, are numbers that we really don’t have our arms around. Between cryptocurrency and AI, energy usage numbers globally will double in 2026, with demand roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption in all of Japan in one year.”
Paper-based industries can “get ahead of the negative conversation about power usage, about forestry, about water use,” she says.
Boxmakers can support Two Sides North America, as well as AICC and other industry groups, to leverage their power to combat greenwashing and advocate for paper-based packaging.
“The corrugated industry has a great opportunity to be a good player, to be a good steward, to be a good citizen in the greater paper story,” Van Sant says. “We need those forests. We can tell the fact that the majority of the pulp used to make corrugated in the United States is sourced locally. That’s a great story to tell.”
M. Diane McCormick is a freelance journalist based in Pennsylvania.
