I’ve always hated those pious “Save the planet: don’t print this e-mail” statements in people’s e-mail signature blocks. Why? Because it is blatant ‘virtue signalling’ – making the author sound virtuous without the inconvenience of actually doing anything virtuous themselves, in this case admonishing others for something they would probably never do.

Fortunately those e-mail mini-sermons are less common these days, unfortunately they seem to be being replaced by equally vacuous tweets instead. This one caught my eye last week:

Repair your shoes, don't just replace them. #EcoMonday #ActOnClimage #SavingAShoeIsSavingTheEarth pic.twitter.com/6CVrWyWJpN

— LoveMyDressShoe (@LoveMyDressShoe) August 16, 2016

Note that the instruction is aimed at the reader, not the author. How many people do you think will see this flicker past on their twitter stream and sit up and say “Oh, I’d never thought of that!”? The “saving a shoe is saving the earth” hashtag is particularly amusing in its vapidity.

Now, if they had linked to a document explaining what elements of a shoe can be repaired and how, that would be useful to the reader and would be making a minor contribution to sustainability. But as it is, this is a particularly irritating form of greenwash.