Easyjet’s greenwash adverts under scrutiny

Easyjet’s adverts use speculative promises about new technologies in the future in order to sell more polluting flights today. With their offer of ineffective carbon offset programmes, the ads attempt to co-opt rising public concern about climate breakdown in order to position EasyJet as a sustainable brand. Our complaint argues this greenwash is materially misleading.

On 14th May 2022, Badvertising and Adfree Cities submitted a complaint to the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to take enforcement action against Easyjet for allegedly breaching consumer protection regulations and the watchdog’s guidance on environmental claims, the “Green Code”. This complaint to the CMA follows a series of repeated missed opportunities by the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to hold major companies to account on key green issues and failures to properly investigate public concerns raised over environmentally-damaging adverts. The complaint is directed at a series of ads touting Easyjet’s “zero emissions” targets and its carbon offsetting program, which we argue are misleading given the airline’s lack of credible plans to mitigate its substantial carbon emissions. 

This complaint comes in the wake of the latest science on global heating from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which highlights the need to curb demand for high carbon activities, especially in transport, and to focus on the emissions of the world's wealthier people, who are those most likely to fly. 

Easyjet’s green lies

The adverts brought to the CMA for scrutiny include Easyjet adverts seen on digital screens at a bus stop at London Victoria (picture 1 and 2 below) and in the Metro newspaper (picture 3 & 4) around the COP26 conference in Glasgow in November 2021 as well as related versions shared on the company’s Twitter and Facebook social media accounts. The complaint also includes Easyjet’s most recent “nextGen” online ad campaign launched on 25th March 2022 (interestingly coinciding with the international day against advertising) and devised by creative agency VCCP, which is currently running across social media platforms, TV, print and websites in five countries.

Picture 1: Easyjet advert seen in London Victoria station on 19th October 2021

Picture 2: Easyjet advert seen in London Victoria station on 19th October 2021

We accuse Easyjet of misleading customers with these adverts by presenting the purchase of plane tickets as sustainable on the basis that the airline offsets all of its carbon emissions and that it is aiming to deploy zero emission technologies by the mid-2030s.

Easyjet’s carbon offsetting claims omit the evidence that the largest warming impacts from flights come from sources other than carbon emissions (in particular contrail cirrus clouds and emitted nitrogen oxides) and fail to acknowledge that carbon offsetting schemes have been accused by various scientific bodies of not offering a credible climate mitigation solution and been found simply not to work. 

The adverts’ claims to be championing a future of “zero emission flights” (ie. electric and hydrogen-powered planes) is equally misleading. Not only are these technologies still speculative and not yet commercially scalable but they also have been forecasted to only account for a small portion of Easyjet’s flights. (1) (2) Besides, the company’s claims in these adverts give the impression that Easyjet is - financially or otherwise - contributing to the deployment of these technologies while in reality their annual report suggests they have made no substantial investments towards it.

Picture 3: Easyjet ad seen in Metro newspaper on 1st November 2021

Picture 4: Easyjet ad seen in Metro newspaper on 1st November 2021

A key concern raised in the complaint is that as a result of these ads, people may choose to fly with Easyjet under a false impression of environmental sustainability. As many look for ways to minimise their environmental impact, ads portraying airlines as ‘green’ risk increasing the rate of flying in absolute terms, as customers choose to fly who might have otherwise chosen alternative, greener modes of transport, risking increasing the already substantial emissions from the aviation sector. 

While this complaint relies on the enforcement powers of the Consumers Market Authority to take action, this strategy is in no way sufficient to face the sheer and increasing number of greenwash advertising by major polluters like Easyjet. To properly tackle this issue at scale requires legislative action to remove all forms of high-carbon advertising in order to meet our pressing climate targets - a measure that was recommended for the first time in the latest IPCC report released just this week.

(1) The UK’s Climate Change Committee anticipates that there will not be “significant fleet penetration” of electric or hydrogen aircraft by 2050 and that as a result they are not “likely to significantly improve the overall UK emissions profile”

(2) The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects that commercial battery electric and hydrogen aircraft would account for less than 2% of global aviation energy consumption in 2050.