Corporate environmental pledges in response to activist pressure. The case of the Greenpeace Detox Challenge

In 2011, Greenpeace launched the Detox my Fashion campaign to challenge fashion brands to eliminate toxic chemicals from their supply chains and products. Over the last few years, this activist endeavour has led eighty companies to sign the Detox 2020 Plan, ratifying corporate commitment to achieve the goal by the year 2020. As the Detox deadline is approaching, this paper explores the progress reports whereby fifteen leading companies have declared their Detox commitment, disseminated data about their toxicological analyses and displayed corporate philanthropy (Catenaccio 2010). The methodological toolkit combines quantitative and qualitative research methods. The texts are first examined through the AntConc corpus linguistics software (Anthony 2009). The analysis draws on the literature on knowledge dissemination (Garzone 2006) and also builds on the concept of rewriting (Lefevere 1992), because most of the progress reports in the corpus present themselves as the intralinguistic translations of Greenpeace reports. In this respect, attention is devoted to how corporate subjects manage, recontextualise and re-express the knowledge gathered and disseminated by Greenpeace in the first place. The findings indicate that, although the linguistic content under analysis is “borrowed” from Greenpeace materials, the environmental NGO is only rarely mentioned as the source and dispenser of knowledge. This “misappropriation of knowledge” can be interpreted as an attempt to conceal the activist spark of the green fashion revolution and put the corporate world in a good light. Moreover, a lexical and discursive insistence on suppliers further corroborates the hypothesis that corporate subjects lay the blame and the responsibility for environmental damage on third parties, thereby putting themselves in the position of claiming originality for their corporate environmental pledges (Press and Mazmanian 2013: 240).