The manufacturer of Glad garbage bags faces potentially millions of dollars in penalties after the consumer and competition watchdog launched legal action in the Federal Court, accusing it of falsely claiming certain bags were made partly from recycled ocean plastic.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has alleged Clorox Australia breached consumer laws when it falsely claimed its Glad Kitchen Tidy Bags and Garbage Bags were made from 50 per cent recycled ocean plastic collected from an ocean or sea.
The packaging was updated between March 2022 and November 2022 to include the headline “made using 50% ocean-bound plastic”.Credit: ACCC
The bags were instead partly made from plastic that was collected in Indonesia – up to 50 kilometres from a shoreline – and not from the ocean or sea as the packaging had claimed.
“We allege that the headline ‘ocean plastic’ statements and wave imagery on the Glad bag packaging, and the use of blue-coloured bags, created the impression that these Glad bags were made from plastic waste collected from the ocean or sea, when this was not the case,” ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said.
“We are concerned that, by its alleged conduct, Clorox deprived consumers of the opportunity to make informed purchasing decisions, and may have put other businesses making genuine environmental claims at an unfair disadvantage.”
Regulators, including the ACCC and the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, have been cracking down on greenwashing, which involves making false or unfounded claims about sustainability and climate action.
ASIC scored its first court win in its anti-greenwashing campaign last month when the Federal Court ruled Vanguard Australia made misleading claims about its environmental credentials in one of its investments products.
MOO Premium Foods entered into a court-enforceable undertaking with the ACCC last year, following an investigation into the yoghurt manufacturer’s headline claims its tubs were entirely made from ocean plastic.
The ACCC probe found the plastic resin used in the tubs was collected from coastal areas in Malaysia, and not directly from the ocean.
Between June 2021 and November 2022, Glad’s small, medium and large kitchen tidy bags stated on the front of its packaging they were made using 50 per cent “ocean plastic”.
The ACCC has taken Clorox, the manufacturer of Glad bags, to the Federal Court.
On the back, it stated the bags were made from 50 per cent ocean recycled plastic, with a disclaimer at the bottom clarifying they were made using plastic collected from communities with no formal waste management system that would have ended up in the ocean.
The packaging was updated between March 2022 and November 2022 to include the headline “made using ocean-bound plastic”.
The ACCC is also alleging Clorox misled and deceived consumers about its large and extra-large garbage bags, which also carried the 50 per cent “ocean plastic recycled garbage bags” headline on its packaging.
The consumer watchdog is seeking declarations, penalties, injunctions, an order to implement a compliance program, corrective notices, costs and other orders.
A Clorox spokeswoman said Glad took seriously its legal obligations to package and market products truthfully.
“We are considering the ACCC’s concerns raised by their court proceedings announced today. The proceedings relate to the 50% Ocean Bound Plastic Recycled Bags product line only (Kitchen Tidy small, medium and large, and Garbage large and extra large), which was discontinued by Glad in July 2023,” the spokeswoman said.
In court documents, the ACCC has alleged Clorox engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct each time it made the ocean plastic representation. It also claimed the company engaged in conduct that was liable to mislead the public about the nature, the manufacturing process and the characteristics of each product.
“The respondent’s conduct took advantage of consumers’ concerns about environmental pollution, particularly plastic waste in the oceans,” court documents state. “Consumers may have purchased and paid for goods represented as conferring an environmental benefit (the removal of plastic waste from the ocean or sea; further or alternatively, from an ocean or a sea, including up to the shoreline), where either there was no such environmental benefit, or such benefit was overstated.”
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