I run a company that sells sustainable foodservice packaging, which means I have a horse in this race and you should read everything below knowing that. It also means I’ve spent sixteen years watching, up close, the gap between what companies say about the environment and what they actually do. That gap has a name — virtue signaling when it’s individuals, greenwashing when it’s corporations — and I want to answer the uncomfortable question honestly: if a green gesture is really just reputation management, is it worth anything at all?
My answer is more complicated than the question wants it to be. But let me start with the part that isn’t complicated.
The theater is real, and I see it weekly
Here’s what greenwashing looks like from where I sit.
A buyer calls us wanting “something that looks compostable.” Not something that is compostable — something that looks it. Kraft-brown, leaf on the label, earthy font. When we walk through what actual certified compostability involves and what it costs, the conversation sometimes ends. The brown box ships anyway, from someone else, and guests feel good about a container that performs no differently than the white one it replaced.
A chain announces a sustainability commitment with a target date fifteen years out, held by no one currently employed there, with no interim milestones. The press release runs everywhere. The procurement specs — the documents that actually determine what gets bought — don’t change.
A company posts the recycling-triangle imagery all over packaging that no municipal recycling program in the country will actually accept, because the item is too small, too contaminated, or made of a resin nobody processes. Technically recyclable somewhere, theoretically. Practically, landfill with better graphic design.
And the social media version: the repost-this-and-we’ll-plant-a-tree campaigns, the Earth Day posts from companies whose core operations haven’t changed a molecule. Support expressed as content, engineered so the audience is other people rather than the atmosphere.
This stuff is corrosive, and not just because it’s dishonest. It’s corrosive because it spends down the public’s trust in all green claims, including the real ones. Every fake compostable container makes a guest a little more cynical about the real one. Greenwashing doesn’t just fail to help; it actively raises the cost of honesty for everyone else. That’s the part that makes it personal for me.
But here’s where I break with the cynics
The fashionable response to all this is to conclude that corporate environmentalism is fake, full stop — that every green claim is marketing and the only authentic position is calling it all theater. I understand the impulse. I think it’s wrong, and I think it’s lazy.
First: motives are unknowable, but actions aren’t. I genuinely don’t care why a restaurant group switches from foam clamshells to fiber ones. Maybe the founder had an epiphany. Maybe a city ordinance forced it. Maybe a competitor did it first and they hated the optics of being behind. The container is the same container. The purchasing decision either happened or it didn’t. If we only counted environmental progress motivated by pure hearts, we’d count almost nothing — and we’d be ignoring how change has always actually worked, which is a tangle of conscience, regulation, competition, and self-interest pulling in the same direction.
Second: signaling, even shallow signaling, moves defaults. When enough businesses perform caring about plastic straws — yes, perform — plastic straws become embarrassing, then optional, then regulated, then gone. The performance creates the social conditions for the substance. I watched this exact sequence happen in foodservice. The first wave of straw-ban announcements was absolutely reputational for many of the brands involved. It still rewired an industry’s defaults and its guests’ expectations, and the material change that followed was real. A hypocritical gesture in the right direction beats a sincere shrug.
Third — and this is the one people miss — the accusation of virtue signaling has itself become a signal. It’s now a reflexive way to dismiss any visible good act without engaging with whether the act did good. “You’re just doing that to look good” is unfalsifiable and effortless. It asks nothing of the accuser. If we treat every green action as suspect until proven saintly, we hand a permanent excuse to the people doing nothing, who get to feel superior to both the fakers and the doers. Cynicism is not a sustainability strategy.
So is it worth it? The test I actually use
The question isn’t signal versus no signal. Every visible choice a business makes signals something; that’s what visibility means. The question is whether there’s anything underneath the signal. Here’s the test I apply — to suppliers, to customers, and to my own company:
Does the claim survive paperwork? Real environmental attributes come with receipts: third-party compostability certification, PFAS test data, material declarations, audit trails. Vague ones come with adjectives. When we say a product is commercially compostable, that’s a certification with a standard behind it, not a vibe. If a company can’t produce documents, it’s producing content.
Did anything internal change? Greenwashing lives entirely in the marketing department. Real change shows up in unglamorous places: procurement specs, supplier contracts, product formulations, waste hauling arrangements. Ask a company what they stopped buying, and you learn more than from anything they announced.
Does it cost them something? Genuine sustainability almost always involves a tradeoff someone had to accept — a higher unit cost, a harder sourcing problem, a product redesign, a margin conversation. If a company’s environmentalism has only ever been convenient, it isn’t environmentalism yet.
Would they do it where no one’s looking? The back-of-house choices — what the kitchen uses, what the warehouse ships in, what happens to the waste — are the tell. Plenty of operators run genuinely thoughtful programs guests never see. That’s the opposite of virtue signaling, and it’s more common than the cynics think.
Regulation, for all its headaches, is quietly making this test easier to run. Packaging producer-responsibility laws now arriving state by state, PFAS restrictions in food packaging, and truth-in-labeling rules for recyclability and compostability claims all share one feature: they replace adjectives with obligations. You can’t greenwash a fee schedule. I’ve written before that I’d rather compete in a market where claims get audited, and I mean it — honest players win when the receipts are mandatory.
What I tell operators
If you run a restaurant and you’re worried your sustainability efforts might be dismissed as signaling, here’s my advice: make the claims small and true. “Our takeout containers are certified commercially compostable, and here’s the local facility that accepts them” beats “we’re committed to the planet” every single time. Guests have finely tuned detectors now; a decade of greenwashing sharpened them. Specific, modest, verifiable claims read as honest because they are.
And if a choice is visible — the straw, the container, the cup — let it be visible without shame. Making good behavior seen is not the sin. Making seen substitute for done is.
The answer
Is being green worth it if it’s just virtue signaling? If it’s just signaling — surface with nothing underneath — no. It’s worse than nothing, because it burns the trust the real work depends on.
But the conclusion people draw from that — go quiet, do nothing visible, dismiss the visible efforts of others — is the wrong lesson. The right lesson is to close the gap between the signal and the substance, in whichever direction it takes. Companies with real programs should show them, receipts attached. Companies with only the signal should be pushed, by customers and regulators, to backfill it with something real — and here’s the thing: pushed hard enough, many of them actually do.
I’ve built my company on the bet that the substance eventually wins. Sixteen years in, watching the fakers get regulated into honesty while the honest players compound trust, I like the bet more than ever. Signal all you want. Just make sure that when someone checks — and someone will check — there’s something there.