The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has pulled a TV and video-on-demand ad for Anglian Water off the air amid greenwashing concerns.
Broadcast in September and October last year, the ad claimed that the water company helped to keep waterways clean by creating wildlife-friendly wetlands, despite a history of sewage dumping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZxdQaxoPTA&ab_channel=AnglianWater
A voicever within the ads said: “Everything [Anglian Water] does today is for tomorrow. Never still, never stop. Anglian Water. Love every drop,” prompting a range of complaints accusing the ad of being ‘misleading’.
The news comes just a few weeks after Water UK released an unreserved apology on behalf of English water companies, including Anglian Water, over unacceptable levels of sewage dumping in waterways up and down the country.
Notably, Anglian Water was fined £2.65 million last month for dumping millions of litres of untreated sewage from a recycling centre in Essex – the largest ever fine dished out for an environmental transgression in the East of England.
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The ASA also pointed out that despite its so-called wildlife-protecting initiatives, Anglian Water was given an environmental performance assessment (EPA) of two stars out of four, signifying that ‘improvement’ is required.
In response, Anglian Water said that it did not “believe that the ads were misleading” and that they included “a number of initiatives that showed where [they] were investing in environmental protection and improvement for the long term.”
It added that the ads were part of a “wider, multi-media and multi-channel campaign which explained each initiative and presented a more complete picture of the impact Anglian Water had on the environment, and how they were taking steps to reduce it where it may have been detrimental.”
It also maintained that it did not actively sewage into rivers and open water and that it “accepted the ruling and took prompt action to remove the advert in line with the Advertising Standard Authority’s guidance.”
The ASA said that it “accepted that Anglian Water were carrying out a number of activities that could have a positive impact on the environment,” but that “because they also carried out activities that caused harm to the environment, which contradicted the overall impression of the ad, [the ASA] considered that was material information which should have been made clear in the ads.”
The regulator concluded that “the ads omitted material information and were therefore misleading.”
