I spent June 5, World Environment Day, thinking about the state of green in our garden city.

In the past 2 years since the explosion of environmentalism, thanks in part to the 2007 international mega-event Live Earth, Singapore has seen a dramatic rise in what is known as “Greenwashing”.

According to Popular science magazine Scientific American, “Greenwashing is what happens when a hopeful public eager to behave responsibly about the environment is presented with ‘evidence’ that makes an industry or a politician seem friendly to the environment when, in fact, the industry or the politician is not as wholly amicable as it or he might be”.

In short, it refers to marketing efforts by companies who want to project a positive image about the companies to bag more profit, without taking any actual steps to mitigate climate change.

At first glance, transport operator, Singapore Mass Rapid Transit (SMRT), is guilty of this.

Its latest campaign titled “SMRT is Green” extols the benefits of traveling on public transport, but fails to go beyond what the public doesn’t already know. It also seems to come across as a ploy to boost profits – to reward commuters for traveling with SMRT, the company’s giving away free transport passes. SMRT has run similar contests over the years under different guises (the most recent being its “Escape to Egypt with SMRT” campaign), and my conversations with friends reveal that none of them actually care about these campaigns as long as they get from point A to point B…but I digress.

A quick check on the “SMRT is Green” campaign and the SMRT corporate websites reveals very little about the company’s environmental policies; only after scrutinising the corporate website is any environmental effort apparent. Interestingly, the campaign website doesn’t contain any information about what the company’s doing to combat environmental degradation – it only contains details about promotions, contest winners, and a paragraph listing the benefits of taking public transport. There’s nothing about the steps SMRT has taken to deal with the issue – nein, nada, nought. Such information is vital if the aim is to move the public away from just the basic knowledge of needing to save the environment (don’t we already know that?), to actually educating them about the intricacies of the issues.

Knowledge can’t be gained without visibility – just like how a child wouldn’t know his father if he wasn’t around. When I first volunteered at Greenpeace in Sydney last year, I had a culture shock, because everyone around me (I’m talking about the general public) seemed to know much more about the environment than I did. They knew about Carbon Capture and Storage, were openly debating the merits of various Emission Trading Schemes, actively recycled their household trash (it helps that it’s mandatory!) and were familiar with climate and environmental vernacular.

Here I was, a Singaporean who felt he knew all there was to know about the environment, in a strange land where environmental issues formed a core of the Rudd Government’s victory in the 2007 Australian federal elections, which led to the creation of the post of Minister for Climate Change and Water (on top of the already present Minister for the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts post) and the creation of a new government ministerial department – the Department for Climate change and Water (which has its own portfolio independent from the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts). I was humbled and had to scour through journals and research publications to get up to scratch, so that I wouldn’t look like a bumbling fool in front of my environmentally ultra-conscious employers.

If it doesn’t want to be seen as insincere and guilty of greenwashing, SMRT needs to take concrete measures to effectively communicate that its business practices or its fleet of vehicles are, indeed, “green”. It need to move beyond the obvious, and go into new territory – things with which the public isn’t familiar, such as the benefits of its new, environmentally friendly buses, its corporate stand and information on how much it invests on climate change mitigation annually.

The company has, in fact, been rather proactive on the environmental front.

In 2008, it rolled out Euro 5 buses that emit fewer pollutants – bringing it in line with buses that run on Compressed Natural Gas. It has also added hundreds of environmentally-friendly taxis to its fleet, and will be doing so for the long term.

In addition, it has looked into environmentally efficient ways to manage its offices and to wash its vehicles. (Click here for more information)

In an interview with Channel NewsAsia, SMRT’s CEO, Ms Saw Phaik Hwa, said, “Going green is not something (we should do)… generations later, (after) something goes wrong… Even when we choose Euro IV for our vehicles and CNG (compressed natural gas) for our taxi drivers, (these will help) save on energy costs.

“So there is a business case for them. We hope that by making these choices, which is good for the environment, it will also be good for them.”

It frustrates me that SMRT has a good product that’s let down by sub-par marketing. Its campaign uses terms such as “Join the Green Revolution” (complete with socialist imagery – ironic, considering the company’s privatised) which really doesn’t do much except to make the campaign seem more desperate.

Half-baked, seemingly profit-driven, and poorly marketed ventures like the “SMRT is Green” campaign only result in a sceptical populace who will soon grow weary, apathetic and doubtful about environmental issues. It completely disregards and reverses the work of thousands of activists, scientists and environmentally conscious citizens by tiring out an already jaded public.

It helps, then, that schools are taking the environmental issue seriously.

Marsiling Primary School, for example, has made environmental education a key component of its drive in providing its students with a holistic education.

When I was a relief teacher there, I was pleasantly surprised to see that students were eager – even adamant – to recycle their trash twice a day. There were separate recycling boxes in every classroom, and representatives from each class would then take the boxes to the main recycling bin with a remarkable sense of purpose.

They were also interested in listening to my environmental education lessons – a far cry from the disdain I used to encounter just 2 years ago.

Now before we thump our chests in proclaiming the progress of our garden city, let us examine what we’ve done so far, and study how we can further evolve. Let us move beyond rhetoric and drive into world-leading action.

Let us be the movers and shakers that we aspire to be. We’ve come so far and achieved so much, but we can always be better.

Sure, a small country like Singapore cannot possibly make a big impact on clearing up the mess that has been – and continues to be – left by polluters. It has been argued that the cost of going green doesn’t justify the end-product. But why should protecting the planet be only about dollars and cents? The country has the potential to be a world leader in adopting groundbreaking pro-environmental policies. Its small size and single-government structure is an asset since implementing such policies and installing the needed infrastructure won’t require as much human and monetary capital as needed in, say, far larger and fragmented nations such as Australia or the United States.

For a start, SMRT would do well to consider introducing a management-level post of Chief Environment Officer. A simple Google search would show that it’s not all that far-fetched.

And one day, we may be heralded as an example to the world; as an environmental leader, despite our limited size and resources.

World Environment Day was declared by the United Nations in 1972, and is hosted by different cities annually. This year’s host was Mexico, with the theme, “Your Planet Needs You – UNite to Combat Climate Change”