Household

A radio advertisement featured a voice over detailing the story of a boiler breaking and a call being placed to a plumber to fix the heating. The plumber responds:

“Don’t panic, get a Firebird boiler! It’s the most efficient on the market and you could save up to €1,300 per year on fuel bills.”

A voice over then states:

“Manufactured in Ireland for forty years, Firebird boilers are environmentally friendly as they are HVO-ready.”

The advertisers’ web address was then provided for consumers to find out more information.

Four complaints were received against the advertisement.

The complainants objected to the claim that the boiler was ‘environmentally friendly’ on the basis that it could theoretically be fuelled by HVO1 in the future. The complainants said that although it could be considered to be potentially more efficient and to potentially burn less CO2 than other boilers on the market, it still burned oil itself and therefore could not be deemed to be environmentally friendly.

The advertisers said that Firebird wanted to play a leading role in decarbonising liquid fuel heating and that since its founding over 40 years ago, had committed large resources to developing new technologies to greatly improve their boiler efficiency and bring new technologies to market to reduce heating emissions.

They said that they believed their advertising was fair and honest and that a Firebird boiler was designed to run on liquid fuels only, which included fossil fuel such as Kerosene or low carbon renewable liquid fuel such as Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO). They said that HVO was made from 100% sustainable recycled feedstocks such as used cooking oil.2

The advertisers explained that all of their boilers were tested with HVO and that, from now on, more buyers would ask them to factory set their new boiler to HVO, and that it could also be bought set for Kerosene and converted to use HVO at a later date. They said that this conversion cost €150 and could be done as part of a routine servicing visit.

They said that when compared to Kerosene, HVO offered a carbon reduction of around 88% and that its carbon intensity was stated as 0.036KG CO2e per kWh whereas
HVO – Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil
2 https://www.neste.com/products-and-innovation/raw-materials/renewable-raw-materials#c548bfba
Kerosene’s carbon intensity was stated as 0.298KG CO2e per kWh3. The advertisers said that they considered 88% carbon reduction when using HVO compared to Kerosene sufficient to vindicate their claim that Firebird boilers were environmentally friendly.

The advertisers said that HVO was already available as a heating fuel for Irish homes and that many liquid fuel distributors were already distributing it across the island of Ireland. They said it was widely used as a renewable transport fuel and pointed to a tax break on biofuels (including HVO) recently introduced by the Minister for Finance in the interest of “incentivising more environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuels”4.

Complaints Upheld.

The Complaints Committee considered the detail of the complaint and the advertisers’ response.

The Complaints Committee noted that the claim “environmentally friendly” was an absolute claim. They noted the substantiation provided which detailed the reduction in CO2 emissions when using HVO versus Kerosene and that although the products could be factory set to be used with HVO, they could also be set to be used with Kerosene with the option of switching to HVO later.

The Committee noted that although reduced when compared to using Kerosene, there was still a carbon cost when using the boiler with HVO and that as an absolute claim, substantiation had not been provided which proved that no damage was caused to the environment when using the boiler in either set-up.

The Committee therefore did not consider that as a whole the boiler could be deemed to be “environmentally friendly” and as such, they considered the advertising to breach the Code at sections 4.1, 4.4 and 15.02.

Action Required:

When highlighting the benefits of their product compared to others, the Complaints
Committee told the advertisers not to exaggerate these benefits. The advertisement must not reappear in its current form.