ASA Complaint against Mazda for Greenwashing

Lawyers for Climate Action NZ has filed a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority alleging that Mazda New Zealand is misleading consumers about the environmental effectiveness of its tree-planting programme.

The complaint, joined by climate change mitigation specialist Paul Young, includes calculations showing that Mazda’s claims are off by a factor of thousands.  

Mazda’s website advertising says that it funds the planting of five trees for each new car sold, and claims that “Over each vehicle's 5-year warranty term, these 5 trees will [..] mitigate any environmental impact from CO2 emissions…”:

However, expert Paul Young’s calculations show that five trees will barely offset any of the cars’ emissions.

For example, for the Mazda CX-5, a standard petrol car, the trees will offset less than 0.1% of emissions from its manufacture and use over the first five years. According to Young’s figures, a new Mazda CX-5 could be expected to emit about 12.7 tonnes of CO2 from petrol burnt over its first five years, and about 23 tonnes if considering lifecycle emissions. By contrast, five native trees would absorb about 0.0015 tonnes of CO2 in this time.

“You would need approximately 41,000 native trees to cover the emissions of a CX-5 (12.7 tonnes) in five years,” says Young. “Even compared over longer timeframes, Mazda’s claims do not come anywhere close to stacking up.”

In bringing this complaint, we do not mean to diminish the positive and important work of Trees That Count, a charity that supports native forest restoration in Aotearoa New Zealand. However, we believe the way in which Mazda promotes its partnership with Trees That Count is misleading. It needs to either plant many more than one tree per year for the first five years of a Mazda’s warranty, or change the wording on its website.

As it stands, the current wording is textbook greenwashing. Mazda is leveraging customers’ genuine concerns about the climate, making them feel better about buying products that contribute to climate change while grossly overstating the actual benefit of Mazda’s tree planting programme. That is irresponsible and unfair - both to consumers trying to make informed choices, and to other companies making more accurate environmental claims.

While it’s obviously in the public interest for companies like Mazda to run tree-planting programmes, marketing claims must accurately reflect what those programmes can actually achieve. Consumers need to be able to trust the information they are given so they can confidently choose climate-friendly products.

Transport is a major source of New Zealand’s emissions. Petrol and hybrid cars burn fossil fuels, which are warming the planet and threatening human well-being and planetary health. In 2023, transport emissions were 19% of New Zealand’s gross emissions, mostly from light vehicles. The Climate Change Commission says that New Zealand needs to reduce transport emissions rapidly to meet our legislated emissions targets.

Lawyers for Climate has also successfully brought complaints against First Gas and Zespri for greenwashing, and last year, along with Consumer NZ and ELI, settled a High Court greenwashing case with Z Energy, over its advertising in which it claimed, “we’re in the business of getting out of the petrol business.”