Environmental performance that exists mainly in the claim, not in the underlying practice.
Greenwashing has a precise definition in the sustainability-management literature: a firm misleads consumers about its environmental performance, or about a specific product’s environmental benefit. The research on why it happens identifies concrete drivers rather than treating it as generic corporate dishonesty — weak or absent regulation creates room for unverifiable claims, market pressure to appear sustainable creates incentive to make them, and internal organisational incentives reward the appearance of progress over the harder, slower work of actually reducing environmental cost.
Plastic-bottle recycling claims are one of the clearest recurring examples in that literature: manufacturing a plastic bottle from recycled material is cheap and marketable, while actually removing plastic waste from oceans and waterways is not cost-effective at any scale that would matter, so the claim substitutes for the practice rather than following from it. The two are correlated: strong recycling messaging and weak actual reduction, precisely because messaging is nearly free and reduction is expensive.
Source: Delmas, M.A. & Burbano, V.C. (2011). “The Drivers of Greenwashing.” California Management Review, 54(1), 64–87.