“[Greenwashing is] inevitable because there’s a market advantage to having a product that’s differentiated by its green properties,” says Caleb Crow, the Energy Conservation Manager of the Office of Energy and Sustainability at Austin Community College. “If a green label is…raising the cost of whatever you’re talking about, that is a competitive disadvantage for that product, compared to a similar product that maybe didn’t go through a vetted process, but puts a similar-looking but rather meaningless label on the product to confuse a buyer, and then that product is, therefore cheaper, even if it’s in other ways similar. So greenwashing has a negative effect on the marketplace because people will be motivated by cost in many instances.”