For a while, the assumption was that greenwashing risk would keep tracking one line: more disclosure rules, more SEC scrutiny, more federal guardrails. That line has flattened out. Federal enforcement from the FTC and SEC has gone quiet, and the robust federal climate disclosure regime many companies were bracing for hasn't materialized.
Yet greenwashing risk has not gone away.
A recent litigation trends update from our friends at Ropes & Gray tracks what's actually happened instead. State attorneys general, private plaintiffs, and environmental advocacy organizations have picked up the enforcement load that federal regulators set down. Additionally, other global jurisdictions — most notably Europe, but also countries including Brazil, South Africa, Singapore and Thailand — have established rules of their own. In other words, the pressure hasn't disappeared, it's just redistributed and more fragmented. (See our Deep Dive on EU Greenwashing Regulation for more specifics on Europe.)
In the United States, New York City is mid-appeal on greenwashing claims against major oil companies. A coalition of trade associations is suing to block California's recyclability labeling law. A consumer class action over "carbon neutral" smartwatch marketing is headed to the Ninth Circuit. And Keurig is facing fresh suits over "recyclable" K-Cup pods — years after paying $10 million to settle nearly identical claims. In other words, the risk is still there. It’s just coming from multiple different directions at once.
As Alexander Simkin from Ropes & Gray emphasized, the unpredictability itself is creating new and very real headaches:
"There is no safe harbor right now. Federal regulators have stepped back, but state AGs, private plaintiffs, and advocacy groups have moved in — and they're operating under different statutes, in different courts, with different standards for what counts as misleading."
The complexity that Simkin refers to creates a unique challenge: Rather than pursuing compliance under a harmonized set of global rules, companies are having to navigate a much more varied and, in some cases, murky landscape. One where risk looks very different depending on the context in which you are operating.
The answer on how to communicate effectively may lie in thinking beyond compliance.
Yes, you need to reduce legal exposure. But chasing risk-avoidance alone tends to produce communications that are vague, forgettable, and ineffective. It bakes in the inevitability of messaging that satisfies a legal review, and yet inspires no one and does nothing. The companies getting real value out of this moment are doing something different: they're building sustainability stories that are substantial enough to survive scrutiny and compelling enough to differentiate them.
Apple’s recent efforts serve as an excellent example. Despite having been subject to lawsuits and activist attention in the past, the company continues to highlight sustainability progress in product launch communications including its “lowest carbon MacBook.” In doing so, the company frames its efforts as a logical extension of its focus on innovation and progress, and leverages that framing to build consumer trust and provide a counterpoint to prevailing ‘anti-Big Tech’ sentiment. It just does so with very clear definitions of its claims, the KPIs it is tracking, and the certifications available to prove them.
The focus on verifiable data points doesn’t mean communications have to be boring. Case in point: Beyond Meat are shaking up the communications space with a satirical skewering of plant-based protein critics. The campaign centers on factual, defensible statements about their product — such as its reliance on U.S. farmers, or its focus on recognizable, everyday ingredients — but presents them as common accusations heard from opponents. The strategy is notable because it does double duty: It speaks directly to Beyond Meat’s core fan base of plant-based advocates, while also addressing potential concerns from health conscious flexitarians that critics are seeking to exploit.
We've written before about the principles that separate credible sustainability claims from the ones that end up in a complaint:
We don’t need to dig into the details of each bullet again here. What's worth underlining, though, is that every one of those principles is also, quite simply, good communications practice. The discipline that keeps you out of the crosshairs of regulators, activists, or the plaintiff’s bar is also the same discipline that makes your story land with customers, investors, and employees.
De-risking and differentiation aren't a trade-off. They are deeply interrelated goals.
In our experience, it helps to work through it in a specific order.
1. Get the foundation right before you talk about it. Communications can only be as defensible as what's underneath them. Before you refine a single sentence of messaging, make sure the substance holds up — climate risk assessments, greenhouse gas accounting, credible pathways behind any forward-looking commitment. A "net zero by 2040" claim that only accounts for 3% of a company's actual emissions, as one recent complaint alleges, isn't a communications problem you can write your way out of. It's a profound, strategic miss. Get that right first, and everything you say afterward has something real to stand on.
2. Know your focus, so you only speak on what matters. When enforcement can come from a state AG, a competitor, a consumer class action, or an activist group, it's tempting to try to say something to everyone about everything. That's exactly backward. Getting disciplined about what matters strategically to your business and brand, and who you're actually talking to, lets you narrow your focus, concentrate your due diligence, and dramatically cut the surface area for getting something wrong. It also happens to be the fundamental rule of good communications: relevance beats volume, every time.
3. Get specific, because vague is exactly what gets challenged. Nearly every case in that Ropes & Gray update turns on the same underlying issue: a claim that sounded fine in a boardroom but couldn't survive contact with a reasonable consumer, a regulator, or a plaintiff's attorney. In mid-to-large companies, claims like these get made by marketing, sales, and investor relations — often independently, often without a shared source of truth. That's why we help clients build a database of vetted, legally defensible claims, each with a clear content owner, a documented source, and notes on how and where it can be used. Teams pull from it instead of improvising, and improvising is where the risk lives.
4. Train the people actually telling the story. A well-vetted claims database is only as good as the people using it. That's why we've built a range of sustainability communications and sales trainings that range from one-hour workshops to multi-week curricula. These programs help sales and marketing teams not only tell your story in ways tailored to different audiences, but also understand exactly what's at stake if they get it wrong. Ideally, this isn't a one-off training but part of a broader employee engagement effort: leadership talking points, marketing-specific tools, and ongoing engagement from the boardroom to the factory floor that keeps the whole organization pointed in the same direction.
5. Don’t be afraid to get creative. Ensuring a robust system for defensible sustainability claims does not mean abandoning creativity — it just means you have a quality list of ingredients with which to cook with. As Beyond Meat’s recent “Think Beyond the Cropaganda” campaign mentioned above shows, it’s possible to create high-concept, deeply impactful marketing that breaks through the noise while still being grounded in the factual truths about your product or brand. (And having credible, third-party certification to prove it.)
Nothing on this list eliminates greenwashing risk entirely. Given how fragmented enforcement has become, nothing could. What it can do is give you a program that's credible under scrutiny, targeted to what your audiences actually care about, documented well enough to defend, communicated clearly, and genuinely understood by the people repeating it every day.
That's the foundation of a sustainability story that doesn’t just minimize the chances of being called out. It maximizes the opportunity to leverage what you do for long-term business success.
Sami Grover is the Communications Strategy Director at thinkPARALLAX. He has a 17-year career as a communications strategist, branding expert, and climate writer. He has collaborated with clients including Blue Diamond Growers, Verathon, Western Digital, and Snap on reporting, sales and staff training, and communicating sustainability efforts in an engaging, human way.