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Delta is facing a class-action lawsuit over greenwashing in its marketing, making it one of the latest brands to be sued because of alleged misleading environmental claims.
At the heart of the lawsuit are the company’s carbon neutrality claims. The suit, filed by California resident Mayanna Berrin, said Delta has “repeatedly touted itself as ‘the world’s first carbon-neutral airline’ across various channels” like LinkedIn, press releases, and even in-flight napkins. In 2020, the airline announced its $1 billion plan to become the world’s first carbon-neutral airline.
The lawsuit states that Delta has positioned itself as “carbon-neutral” by participating in the “voluntary carbon offset market.” Companies can buy carbon offsets to essentially cancel out their carbon dioxide emissions by investing in things like forest preservation or funding solar farms. In Delta’s case, “those investments ended up including ‘protecting half a million acres in an Indonesian peat swamp forest and a Cambodian wildlife sanctuary,’” according to the lawsuit.
But as MIT Sloan professor John Sterman told Marketing Brew last year, offsets are “mostly bunk” and have to meet several criteria to actually be effective. “The offset has to reduce the emissions somewhere that would not have otherwise been reduced,” he said at the time. “If you preserve a forest that would not have been cut anyway, you haven’t done anything yet.”
The lawsuit alleges that Delta’s carbon neutrality claims are “false and misleading” due to the “foundational issues with the voluntary carbon offset market.” According to the lawsuit, “consumers would not have purchased tickets” on Delta flights, or would have “paid substantially less for them, had they known the claim of carbon neutrality was false.”
Berrin’s lawyer, Jonathan Haderlein, told Marketing Brew his client “wants Delta to issue a retraction and she wants some sort of financial compensation to passengers who believed they were flying America's most climate-conscious airline.”
Delta, on the other hand, said the lawsuit is “without legal merit” in a statement shared by a company spokesperson Grant Myatt. Since March of last year, Delta “has fully transitioned its focus away from carbon offsets toward decarbonization of our operations, focusing our efforts on investing in sustainable aviation fuel, renewing our fleet for more fuel-efficient aircraft and implementing operational efficiencies,” the statement said.
The airline is not the only company being sued for purported greenwashed marketing. Last year, a California woman filed a lawsuit against Danone over its “carbon-neutral” statements on Evian water bottles. Nike and H&M have also recently been accused of greenwashing.