An organization I worked for was sued for the publication of partial information from a report we conducted, because the commissioner of the study only communicated isolated facts. It might have been the first Life Cycle Assessment study held up to the spotlight through litigation. The case went all the way to the German supreme court, the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig. The plaintiff’s attorney requested a cease and desist order for the entire report, claiming that the authors of the Life Cycle Assessment study made 80 mistakes leading to inaccurate results. It required serious efforts on our part to disprove the claims.
We ended up winning the trial by disproving there was any error in 79 of the accusations, and we had to correct one recycling rate by 3%. The commissioner who opened the organization up to this kind litigation through his generalized communication learned a costly lesson, namely how to communicate responsibly next time. So that you don’t make the same kind of mistake, I’d like to share with you a few practical tips for how to be responsible in your sustainability efforts and communication.
