On the day that Royal Dutch Shell has released its 2006 sustainability report, Friends of the Earth Europe is filing simultaneous complaints (PDF) to the national advertising standards authorities of Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK about a Shell advertisement which Friends of the Earth says depicts the outline of an oil refinery emitting flowers rather than smoke and claims that it uses its “waste CO2 to grow flowers and [its] waste sulphur to make concrete.”
Friends of the Earth Europe is objecting to the overall message and imagery used. The advertisement says ‘Don’t throw anything away, there is no away,’ but FOE says that “the implication that Shell carries out its operations in line with this is false and misleading. Shell’s advertis also misleading because it suggests that Shell uses all of its waste CO2 to grow flowers while in reality it uses less than 0.5 percent of it to grow flowers.”