‘I’m Breaking The Silence’: The Woman Who Says She Is Exposing Greenwashing in Global Advertising

Polina Zabrodskaya is a woman used to toxicity. She grew up against a backdrop of industrial decay in the city of Tula, Russia — an infamous environmental disaster zone south of Moscow. Black deluges, sludge rivers and chemical slimes were her childhood realities — visible scars left by factories that, at least on paper, adhered to the strictest of environmental regulations.

“Two hundred factories, if memory serves,” she told Byline Times in her North London home. “Usually, all that environmental damage is hidden elsewhere. In my case, it was obvious. Dead rivers, poisoned soil beyond recovery, black snow. Diseases through the roof.”

It was a poisoned childhood that profoundly influenced her — a raw awareness of the environmental impact of industrialism, and the human costs found between the immediacy of manufacturing pollution and the distance of corporate lies.

“This disconnect between promises and environmental damage was so obvious very early on,” she says today from her quiet living room, noteworthy for its order and minimalism.

The environmental devastation was to become deeply personal. “My mum and grandma passed away from cancer. Not surprising. It’s very hard to prove (a link). Even if contamination and pollution are proven, there is still plausible deniability.”

Zabrodskaya left that poisoned town and eventually settled in the UK, building a successful career in advertising. She became a Creative Partner at Abbott Mead Vickers (AMV) BBDO, drawn initially by the firm’s public commitment to ethical practices and environmental responsibility. But her faith began to unravel when she was tasked with leading a global environmental sustainability campaign for Galaxy chocolate, a brand owned by the global, family-owned company Mars, Incorporated.

Mars considers itself an ethical company. In 2019, for instance, it noted on its website that “for the second year in a row, The Ethisphere® Institute has named us to their list of the 2019 World’s Most Ethical Companies.” Mars did not make it on the 2025 list. 

Perhaps that fall from grace was part flagged in 2023, when a report by Ethical Consumer (EC) criticised Mars, as well as the leading chocolate brands Cadbury, and Nestlé, for having inadequate ethical standards in their cocoa supply chains. Only 17 out of 82 companies the EC investigated reportedly paid cocoa farmers enough to live on and concerns were raised about child labour in the cocoa industry, particularly in West Africa.

Today Mars promises a golden ticket of hope on its website: “We take responsibility without being asked. We support the responsibilities of others.”

Zabrodskaya might disagree.

“Sometimes you look at what you’re being asked to advertise, and things don’t add up,” she says. Tasked with amplifying Mars’ sustainability claims about cocoa production, she claims to have soon found jarring contradictions.

“If I’m asked to advertise marginal efforts like building schools in West Africa, the first question is why can’t they build their own schools? Why do they need a white saviour? When you Google cocoa environment sustainability, the first things that come up are… extreme poverty, exploitation, deforestation. You see that systemically no progress is being made.”

She says she raised her concerns within her advertising company about what she viewed as a dissonance between the company’s public-facing environmental claims and what she believed to be the ongoing realities of its supply chains. But her attempts to highlight such contradictions internally were met with resistance. Managers, she claimed, discouraged her and she says she soon found herself isolated. 

“One colleague said, ‘Why are you trying to make us look morally bankrupt?’ I was just asking how we run this campaign when there’s child labour in the supply chain. People felt outraged, threatened,” she alleges.

She shares a text message from a former colleague. It offers a glimpse into something rarely publicly said: an advertising executive writing that “Mars asked us to make the brand famous for something that they will struggle to substantiate…(but) if we wait for them to have a good story on cocoa sustainability, then we will be waiting until we retire.”

Zabrodskaya says she ran up against similar contradictions with Mars’ Sheba pet food sustainability initiatives. 

“Sheba builds advertising campaigns on coral restoration, bypassing (debates about) the supply chain entirely,” she says. “They advertise marginal efforts that do nothing to protect the oceans. Consumers feel Sheba has a net positive influence, and that’s just not true. This is how greenwashing works  — it’s not an outright lie, but a carefully selected portion of reality, heavily advertised while damage is concealed.”

Sheba, meanwhile, says on their website that “‘sustainability’ means different things to different people.” It says that it has a “credible commitment to responsible seafood.”

To Zabrodskaya, this was not honest enough. Not all of the fish in Sheba’s cat food had obtained a sustainability certification. But her insistence on full transparency, she believes, led to even fuller professional consequence. 

“I had utmost trust in my top managers,” she says. “My chief creative officer told me to stop digging because it would only lead to heartbreak.

“My unicorns died after that conversation,” she says.

Zabrodskaya found herself, she says, reprimanded and excluded. After months of enduring obstruction and emotional distress, she felt forced to resign, citing constructive dismissal. She is currently taking her ex-employer, AMV BBDO, to court. 

Today, Zabrodskaya sees whistleblowing as essential, driven by a profound sense of moral responsibility. 

“I benefited from that exploitation massively,” she admits.

It was my duty to speak with the client, and when that got nowhere, I had to go public. I’ve exhausted all internal avenues

Polina Zabrodskaya

She says her goal now is to empower others to challenge corporate greenwashing without fear. “I want to make it safer for people (in advertising) to say, ‘I’d rather not do that’,” she says. “Historically whistleblowers say things we already know. I’m not exposing some unknown conspiracy.”

She is supported by NGOs and climate advocacy groups covering some, but not all, of her legal expenses. Today she calls for systemic change, arguing for the need for genuine corporate accountability and transparent environmental practices. “We bear collective damage, allowing few to profit,” she says. “I believe this is all in the public interest.”

Her tribunal hearings potentially extend into 2026. “I don’t know what I don’t know,” she says. “For me, it was an obvious choice. But for someone else, it might not be.”

Byline Times approached both Mars and AMV BBDO for comment, but none were forthcoming.  

In 2023, two years before Zabrodskaya left the ad agency, AMV BBDO reported it had launched a sustainability consultancy to help clients navigate greenwashing issues, train staff, and foster sustainability. The Financial Times have reported that the agency, a UK subsidiary of the New-York based Omnicom group, is to “refute” the “various claims” made by Zabrodskaya. 

Mars has also been reported as saying that this was “an internal employment dispute” at AMV BBDO and that it was investing billions to make its business “more sustainable”.

As for Zabrodskaya, her journey from Tula’s industrial decay to the heart of London’s corporate advertising world, there to find similar concerns about the environment harmed, maybe offers the rest of us just a glimpse into greenwashing practices in modern business.  

Zabrodskaya is adamant hers is a clarion call not just for whistleblower support, but also for corporate reform, at every level, made despite coming with its own risks.

“Even if you prove the truth, the fight can break you,” she says. 

For Zabrodskaya, it seems, silence was never an option.