A wide variety of methods and strategies are employed in the practice of greenwashing:

• A product, service, etc. is advertised as sustainable or environmentally friendly due to one characteristic, although the majority of the other product components or characteristics are harmful to the environment.
• Individual products, services, processes etc. are emphasised and advertised as sustainable – this is also correct in relation to the specific element, but it ignores the fact that the acting entity (e.g. the company) does not otherwise adopt sustainable practices in its activities and production processes.
• Statements are made that are not or only barely verified by independent sources or can be substantiated by serious, meaningful studies.
• A product is sold with outer packaging that makes the product appear more environmentally friendly to consumers through its visual design.
• Unclear terms are used to advertise a product, service, etc.
• Misleading, merely symbolic or self-invented labels are used, which are therefore uncontrolled and thus meaningless in terms of content.
• Statements are made that are true, but do not represent any relevant information and are therefore not really meaningful (e.g. hairspray that is advertised as CFC-free, although CFCs have been banned since 2015 and this is therefore required by law).
• Actors constantly emphasise the relevance of sustainability symbolically, but can hardly point to any actual activities to prove that it is not just symbolic.
• A service, a product, a concept, a company, etc. is advertised with statements that simply do not correspond to the truth.
• A company, etc., presents compliance with legal regulations, for example with regard to emissions, as its own success and as a voluntary approach in order to create a sustainable image.
• A company tries to influence politicians through lobbying in order to indirectly influence laws on environmental regulations, for instance.
• Actors enter into targeted collaborations or cooperation projects with partners, sponsor them or accept funding from them, which in turn have a green image and are associated with sustainability; the green image should rub off, so to speak. The sponsorship of the 27th UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt (COP 27) by the Coca-Cola Company can be seen as a prominent example of this. See: European Parliament: Coca-Cola's sponsorship of COP 27 Parliament question E-003314/2022. Online Version
• Agents conceal their (co-)causation of a problem and present themselves as part of the solution.
• When emphasising the sustainability and environmental friendliness of a product, only the emissions caused by the direct use or consumption by the person consuming it are taken into account, but not the emissions caused by the entire production process and along the value chain.
• Companies, organisations etc. present themselves as sustainable, but in addition to the economic dimension (if at all), they only focus on the ecological dimension and neglect the social dimension of sustainability. For example, fair working conditions and wages, the protection of trade union rights or even human rights etc. are not taken into account. Thus. perhaps one aspect of sustainability is being addressed while others are being ignored.