The world’s largest coal mining firm is to “aggressively” pursue solar energy and continue to close smaller mines.
Coal India Limited (CIL) plans to invest in a 3,000 megawatt solar energy project in a joint venture with state-run NLC India.
The company also wants to compete in India’s solar auctions and win projects by offering the lowest prices for clean power.
It marks a major shift for the firm, which produces most of India’s coal.
“Coal as you know, we’re going to lose business in the next two, three decades. Solar will take over (from) coal slowly as a major energy provider in the coming years,” CIL’s chairman Pramod Agarwal said in an interview with Reuters.
The company’s solar project with NLC India will be worth 125bn rupees ($1.73bn ; £1.26bn), with CIL expected to invest roughly half of that figure by 2024.
The group closed 82 mines in the three years to March 2020, and reduced its workforce by 18,600 employees.
Mr Agarwal said he expected further reductions to the workforce, with the savings potentially reinvested into solar wafer production.
Energy transformation
India currently uses about one billion tons of coal annually, making it the world’s second largest consumer behind China.
That’s slightly more than all US coal companies produced in 2019, according to figures from the US Energy Information Agency.
India is hoping for a significant shift in its energy mix over the coming years to help it meet its climate targets.
The country is a signatory to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, and it has committed to reducing its emissions by up to 35% by 2030 from 2005 levels.
Last year, the country’s emissions fell for the first time in decades.
Although the lower emissions were partly due to strict Covid-19 lockdown measures, lower demand for coal was also a factor.
India hopes to generate 175GW of renewable energy capacity by next year, with a target of 450GW by the end of the decade.
On Friday, China set out an economic blueprint for the next five years, which was expected to substantiate the goal set out last fall by President Xi Jinping for the country to reach net-zero emissions before 2060 and hit peak emissions by 2030.
While the plan calls for a “major push” on clean energy development, a few aspects have left climate experts with questions about how exactly the world’s largest emitter will hit its stated climate goals. For example, the plan did not include a ban on new coal projects, nor did it set a “carbon cap” to define what peak emissions will be, instead setting a carbon intensity target that is the same as in the previous five-ear plan.
However, some are hopeful that the government will announce more detailed regulations on carbon-intensive construction and manufacturing industries later this year, and that more details will be laid out in an upcoming separate five-year plan for the energy sector. Fan Dai, director of the California-China Climate Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, told Quartz that the plan is “simply aggregating existing targets from last year.”
Dai added that “[t]here’s a lot of room for further development and ambition, especially around those targets that were missing that we hoped would be included.”
As reported by The Guardian:
China will reduce its “emissions intensity” – the amount of CO2 produced per unit of GDP – by 18% over the period 2021 to 2025, but this target is in line with previous trends, and could lead to emissions continuing to increase by 1% a year or more. Non-fossil fuel energy is targeted to make up 20% of China’s energy mix, leaving plenty of room for further expansion of the country’s coal industry.
Swithin Lui, of the Climate Action Tracker and NewClimate Institute, said: “[This is] underwhelming and shows little sign of a concerted switch away from a future coal lock-in. There is little sign of the change needed [to meet net zero].”
Zhang Shuwei, chief economist at Draworld Environment Research Centre, said: “As the first five-year plan after China committed to reach carbon neutrality by 2060, the 14th five-year plan was expected to demonstrate strong climate ambition. However, the draft plan presented does not seem to meet the expectations. The international community expected China’s climate policy to ‘jump,’ but in reality it is still crawling.”
JOHOR BARU: Johor will soon become a major producer of environmentally-friendly energy with the opening of a solar power plant in Pengerang, Kota Tinggi.
This was announced by Sultan of Johor Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar in a posting on his Facebook page.
The RM1.4 billion power plant, named the “Sultan Ibrahim Solar Park”, is touted to be the biggest of its kind in Southeast Asia with a combined installed capacity of 450 megawatts.
It will also be the region’s largest solar energy storage system when fully commissioned by 2023.
This marks the state’s first major private investment project for 2021, and the result of Sultan Ibrahim’s continued efforts to woo investors and spur Johor’s economic growth for the benefit of the people.
The ruler will officiate the official ground-breaking ceremony on March 23 at the project site in Pengerang.
The project is also in line with the 2030 Johor Sustainable Development Plan which places major emphasis on environmental preservation and protection as part of the state’s economic development plan for a more prosperous society.
Sultan Ibrahim said the project will have a healthy economic spillover effect for the people in the form of job creation at various levels.
“With this exciting project, Johor will make a quantum leap into the world of renewable and sustainable clean energy,” the ruler told the Royal Press Office (RPO).
He said the project will mark Johor’s first major foray into large-scale sustainable energy to foster green economies and a cleaner environment.
“Johor is one of the states blessed with high sun hours. It is time that we tapped into this resource to boost our power-generating capacity and contribute to the production of renewable energy,” said Sultan Ibrahim.
Will people in price-sensitive Asia only buy clean energy if it’s cheap? Eco-Business spoke to clean energy entrepreneurs about why consumer behaviour is lagging behind investment trends in Asia, and what can be done to persuade more people to switch to clean electricity.
Clean energy is on the rise, even in Asia, where fossil fuels play a stubbornly resilient role in the region’s energy story. The proportion of renewable energy consumed in Asia is projected to double within the decade.
The big question is, what will persuade the region’s consumers to switch to clean electricity? Will people in price-sensitive Asia only buy clean energy if it’s cheap?
A GlobalData consumer survey in 2019 showed that 45 per cent of consumers in Asia Pacific prefer to buy products that are “better for the environment”. Asian consumers also expect brands to care about society. Compared to just 41 per cent in the US and 46 per cent in the UK, 58 per cent of Asian consumers prefer to see brands leading meaningful initiatives in their communities.
But that does sentiment translate to the energy people consume?
Martin Lim, CEO of Singapore-based marketplace for retail electricity, Electrify.sg, says that although investors are showing a growing appetite for clean energy in Asia, consumers seem to be behind the curve. Out of about 66,000 residential rooftops in Singapore, less than 1,400 have adopted solar panels in their homes, he notes. Why?
Requiring about $20,000 in upfront investment, a home solar panel system in Singapore would still need about 6-10 years before it starts to provide owners with “free energy”; after offsetting the energy expenditure of household consumption.
Jeffrey Char, founder and CEO of SOGO Energy, a Japan-based renewable energy investment firm that serves rural communities in developing countries, believes that Asian consumers still tend to be rather price-sensitive, even in wealthier countries like Singapore.
Even if there’s a one-cent difference, the percentage of consumers who would pay extra would probably drop from 90 per cent to 10 per cent.
Jeffrey Char, CEO and founder, SOGO Energy
Increasing financial pressures in the region like household debt only serve to heighten the price sensitivity to “non-essential” or “luxury” goods.
Furthermore, Asian consumers are twice as likely as their American counterparts to tighten their wallets after a crisis. 60 per cent of consumers in this region are putting more money aside for rainy days post Covid-19, according to a study by Bain and Facebook.
Karlo Edesson Abril, accounts manager of Filipino solar energy developer SunAsia Energy, thinks that economic status is still the largest determinant of individuals’ power to vote with their wallets.
“Sustainability and green energy is the way to go, but for people who are just living from day to day, every peso counts. So if green energy is cheap, people will go for it, but price is still the main concern.”
What is causing clean energy inertia in Asia?
What experts agree on is that the lack of consumer demand is not due to the inefficacies of renewables, and emerging reports are proving renewables to be the lowest cost form of energy in many countries.
But larger factors are at play that makes switching less worthwhile.
For one, clean energy might cost more in developed countries, because of existing grid and pricing infrastructure that favours traditional energy sources.
“In Singapore, you flip a switch and the lights come on. In other parts of Asia, you have people whose generators go out all the time because of poor infrastructure. They’re using fossil fuels in a very suboptimal way, and it ends up being very expensive and very dirty. Having the choice to invest in clean energy versus fossil fuels from scratch, it makes sense for them to choose the former,” explains Char.
It is for this reason that rural Asia and Africa might leapfrog developed economies to clean energy “in the same way they didn’t build telephone networks and jumped straight to cell phones,” he says.
Levelling the playing field
While meeting global climate targets will likely depend on stronger demand for clean electricity in Asia, stakeholders are using a variety of approaches to help consumers make the switch.
SOGO allows its clients to completely avoid transmission costs by installing solar power locally, giving clean energy a 9 yen (USD$0.086) competitive advantage.
On a governmental level, support seems to be headed in the right direction. “I think it’s commendable for The Department of Energy in the Philippines to start quantifying generation instead of capacity, looking more at consumer-centric prices (kilowatt-hours) instead of installed capacity,” says Abril.
Nevertheless, it remains hard for clean energy projects to remain financially sustainable if they drain state funds with feed-in tariffs.
Perhaps the most recent and notable example of this is the Japanese government’s cutting of feed-in-tariff purchase prices towards 2019, even though the return of investment for post-Fukushima solar farms was staggeringly profitable.
“The investments in these solar farms [in Japan] took only about four years or less to break-even, which is twice as fast as that of anywhere else around the world,” Lim says. “But feed-in-tariffs is a model that eventually stops because the premium is paid for by the state.”
Governmental initiatives need to be complemented by market mechanisms to promote organic demand.
Clean energy washing?
A looming danger is that consumers might purchase the cheapest available clean energy plan—which might not actually reduce their carbon footprint.
Since the launch of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme 15 years ago, mandating big emitters to offset via carbon reduction projects, the demand boom for carbon offsets has resulted in incidences of fraud and greenwashing.
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs), which provide proof of a carbon offset, are a reliable way to offset emissions. Whereas a typical reforestation project might be time and cost-intensive, solar and wind projects are easy to audit even on a large scale, according to Kang Jen Wee, founder and CEO of renewable energy certification company Trecs.ai. But the currency is not flawless; RECs could be subject to double-counting or false reporting.
RECs emerged more than 10 years ago, as a tool to address flaws in the carbon crediting system. At that time, there was no high-speed broadband, but today we can tap on real-time data to avoid greenwashing.
Martin Lim, founder and CEO, Electrify.sg
To ensure a reliable offset, there are firms that specialise in verification, such as Trecs.ai, which holds REC sellers accountable. Using blockchain technology, every transaction can be tracked in the public domain, and consumers can find out exactly where their clean energy originates from by keying in the serial number of their purchased REC.
Meanwhile, Electrify works to attribute the energy in real-time, limiting the amount of clean energy one can buy to offset their emissions at each time period. This ensures sustainable rates of consumption.
Ultimately, consumers are more likely to switch to clean energy if they are made aware of its benefits.
“If we put environmental education in the general curriculum, we can educate everyone of the benefits of clean energy,” says Abril. Sustainability Reporting is also an important way to employees to be more conscious of their energy consumption choices and therefore carbon footprint, he says.
The end of 2020 marked the moment, under the Paris Agreement’s “ratchet mechanism”, when nations were supposed to formally submit more ambitious commitments for cutting their emissions.
However, just 45 “parties” (44 countries, plus the EU’s 27 member states viewed as one bloc) met this deadline.
After a year disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, nations representing only around 28 per cent of global emissions registered new or updated “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) on the UN’s official registry by the end of the year.
Some big emitters did register their NDCs in time, including the UK and EU. But major absences included the US, India and China.
Informal consultations at COP25 Madrid. Credit: Kiara Worth | IISD/ENB.
Even among the new submissions, many showed no increase in ambition since the first pledges made five years ago, or even backtracked with scaled-back proposals.
Here, Carbon Brief analyses the various new pledges and how they add up. However, one expert tells Carbon Brief that, while there was reason for hope among the new NDCs, the collective plans are still “totally off” what is required to achieve the Paris Agreement’s global warming targets.
Why were new climate pledges expected in 2020?
Every party that signed up to the Paris Agreement has to commit to a target for cutting its share of global emissions, known as its NDC, every five years.
In the run up to the COP21 climate summit in Paris, most nations had submitted intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs), which automatically became their first NDCs unless parties chose to submit updated versions.
A few countries like North Korea and Panama chose to hold off and submit their NDCs after ratifying the Paris Agreement.
According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 190 parties, including the 27 EU member states, have now submitted first NDCs. A handful, including Iran, Iraq and Turkey have yet to do so.
Most of the pledges to reduce emissions within the NDCs were communicated as percentage reductions from a fixed baseline by a fixed year, although some, notably China and India, based theirs on cuts in “emissions intensity of GDP”. To add to the confusion, nations picked different starting points and target years.
Crucially, the initial round of INDCs was not enough to meet the climate targets set out in Paris, a point acknowledged at the time by world leaders.
Estimates suggest they would set the planet on a course for around 3C of warming, rather than the 2C or stretch target of 1.5C that nations had agreed in Paris in 2015.
Now, five years after the Paris Agreement was adopted, countries are obliged to renew and upgrade their NDCs. This is the first test of the “ratchet mechanism” embedded in the agreement, which seeks to scale up the ambition of pledges over time.
The chart below shows the progress some of the world’s major economies have made in cutting emissions from a baseline of 1990 – which is used by the EU and UK.
The coloured dotted lines indicate a linear trajectory of necessary further cuts to meet their NDC targets for 2030. China and India’s GDP-based NDCs are not shown, but the light grey line indicates the progress China, the UK and the EU must make towards their net-zero targets.
Change in greenhouse gas emissions, per cent, from 1990 for a selection of key economies, with rough pathways to NDC (coloured dotted lines) and net-zero (light grey dotted lines) targets based on a simplified and indicative linear trajectory, not actual projections of future emissions pathways. Historical emissions data includes all greenhouse gases and land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), but only goes as far as 2017, which impacts the trajectory of NDC and net-zero targets. Unlike other parties, the US has not submitted a 2030 NDC yet so its pathway only goes to 2025. China and India do not have NDCs expressed as emissions percentage reductions, so their NDC pathways are not included. The EU’s net-zero trajectory is difficult to see as it follows a similar trajectory to its NDC pathway. Source: Climate Watch. Charts made by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
This chart, meanwhile, shows the progress some of the world’s major economies have made in cutting emissions from a baseline of 2005, which is used by the US.
Change in greenhouse gas emissions, per cent, from 2005 for a selection of key economies, with rough pathways to NDC (coloured dotted lines) and net-zero (light grey dotted lines) targets based on a simplified and indicative linear trajectory, not actual projections of future emissions pathways. Historical emissions data includes all greenhouse gases and land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF), but only goes as far as 2017, which impacts the trajectory of NDC and net-zero targets. Unlike other parties, the US has not submitted a 2030 NDC yet so its pathway only goes to 2025. China and India do not have NDCs expressed as emissions percentage reductions, so their NDC pathways are not included. The EU’s net-zero trajectory is difficult to see as it follows a similar trajectory to its NDC pathway. Source: Climate Watch. Charts made by Carbon Brief using Highcharts.
In line with the Paris Agreement, nations that only set an initial NDC covering the period up to 2025, such as the US, must now produce one that goes to 2030, and those that already contained a 2030 target must “communicate or update” their NDCs.
The agreement also states “the efforts of all parties will represent a progression over time” and will reflect the “highest possible ambition”.
However, as the text does not explicitly require new pledges to be submitted if they already run to 2030, there is room to interpret it as meaning that previous NDCs can be re-communicated. Adopting clearer language on the need for ambition was a contentious topic at COP25 in 2019.
“There is a legal dispute on what is allowed and what is not allowed, Prof Niklas Höhne from Climate Action Tracker (CAT) tells Carbon Brief, adding that nevertheless he sees it clearly:
I would argue that in the last five years, for example, renewables have become much, much cheaper than they were projected five years ago, so the situation is completely different and every country can go back and check whether they can do a little bit more.
Niklas Höhne, founder, Climate Action Tracker
Parties were initially asked in the decision text following the Paris Agreement to inform the UN of their new NDCs nine to twelve months before the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow so that the UNFCCC secretariat could prepare a synthesis report based on their contents.
Just three nations representing around 0.1 per cent of the world’s emissions met this deadline.
This “symbolic” date was ultimately delayed after the Covid-19 pandemic led to the COP’s postponement.
Instead, the UNFCCC announced it would publish an initial version of the NDC report by 28 February 2021, based on the NDCs in its registry as of 31 December 2020. The report will then be updated with any new information closer to COP26.
While some nations expressed concerns about their capacity to assemble new NDCs by the end of the year, a letter written in August 2020 by UNFCCC executive secretary Patricia Espinosa made it clear that the end-of-year deadline was still considered important.
“I strongly encourage Parties to submit their updated or new NDCs in accordance with this timeline,” she wrote.
Which nations have announced new targets?
The table below shows the nations that heeded Espinosa’s advice and made their new announcements by 31 December 2020.
The EU, Russia, Brazil, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Mexico, Zambia and the UK are the only economies each contributing around 1 per cent or more of global emissions that have announced new targets.
However, as analysis by CAT indicates, some nations that met the deadline merely restated past commitments or made new ones that did not substantially increase ambition. (See section below.)
Many of the first countries to come forward with updated NDCs were small island states and other nations that are highly exposed to climate impacts, but contribute very little to global emissions. The Marshall Islands, for example, submitted its new NDC almost two years earlier than most other parties.
Also included in the table are nations that have indicated an intention to “enhance ambition or action in new or updated NDCs”, as recorded by the WRI’s Climate Watch resource.
This group contains an additional 82 nations, accounting for around 33per cent of total emissions.
Many of these commitments came from an announcement made at COP25 by 103 countries to “enhance ambition of their NDCs by 2020”.
China, the world’s largest emitter, remains the biggest omission from the table, although its leader Xi Jinping announced at a UN climate ambition summit in December that his nation would aim for carbon neutrality by 2060 and scale up its 2030 NDC in line with this. However, China has yet to formally register its new NDC with the UN.
China’s proposed NDC changes include a cut to the CO2 intensity of its GDP by more than 65per cent from 2005 levels, compared to its earlier target of 60-65per cent. While this marks an increase in ambition, it suggests that – in the short term and depending on assumptions about GDP growth – China’s emissions cuts will be modest. (See Carbon Brief’s analysis of China’s new 2030 pledge.)
Meanwhile, the US does not appear in the table above, although president-elect Joe Biden is expected to set out plans for a new NDC after he has taken office later this month and the US re-joins the Paris Agreement.
Other major emitters that have not come forward with new plans include India, Indonesia, Iran, Canada, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Collectively, these six nations contribute around 17per cent of global emissions.
Do the new pledges reflect an increase in ambition?
Submission of a new NDC does not automatically mean a more ambitious commitment and commentators have pointed out that several of the plans released by large countries fall short of what is required.
At the “climate ambition summit” hosted online last month by the UN, UK and France to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, 45 nations came forward with enhanced NDCs.
According to Taryn Fransen, an international climate change policy expert at WRI, there has been a “mixed bag” so far, with the EU and UK in particular taking a “significant step up”.
She notes that a number of Latin American countries have also raised their ambition, including Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Peru.
Prof Niklas Höhne from CAT tells Carbon Brief that, while the situation is “much better” than he would have imagined six months ago, “it is still not sufficient”.
We have several countries that have submitted the same thing or even [gone] backwards, so there’s still a lot to do this year…What’s very clear is that we are not a little bit off we are totally off when you add all the different pledges of countries.
Niklas Höhne,founder, Climate Action Tracker
NDCs from major economies have been analysed by CAT to assess whether or not they represent an increase in ambition from previous commitments.
Lower ambition: Brazil and Mexico
Brazil has been the subject of extensive criticism for producing a new NDC that not only fails to raise ambition, but uses an accounting “trick” to make its initial pledge less ambitious.
The nation says it will cut emissions by 43per cent over the next decade compared to 2005 levels, the same as its previous proposal.
However, methodological changes in the emissions inventory since the first pledge was made mean this is now a considerably higher starting point.
The Climate Observatory, a Brazilian NGO, estimates this would mean an additional 400m tonnes of CO2e (MtCO2e) being released in 2030 compared to the original 2015 plan.
As of 2017, Brazil’s total annual emissions were around 1.4bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2).
The nation has also mentioned a potential 2060 net-zero goal, but said this is conditional on the payment to Brazil of $10bn per year in climate finance by other countries.
In a critique of the government’s plans, WWF says this request comes “despite [Brazil] being one of the 10 largest economies in the world”.
As a result, CAT has downgraded Brazil’s NDC from “insufficient” for meeting Paris goals to “highly insufficient”. President Jair Bolsonaro was also excluded from the recent climate ambition summit due to his nation’s insufficient plans.
Fransen says Mexico has similarly submitted a new pledge, based on a business-as-usual baseline, that is weaker than its original NDC.
“In the updated NDC they have revised those [baseline] projections upwards which of course means their achieving their target will result in higher 2030 emissions than it would have before,” she says.
The NDC has also got rid of a reference to emissions peaking in 2026.
Lacking ambition: Russia and Vietnam
Russia states in its new NDC that it “demonstrates an increasing ambition compared to earlier commitments to limit greenhouse gas emissions”.
Its previous submission from 2019 contained a commitment to cut emissions by between 25-30per cent of 1990 levels by 2030.
The new one pledges to cut emissions by 30per cent. (Russia was one of the last nations to submit a first NDC, having only ratified the Paris Agreement in October 2019.)
But the ambition of this NDC is debatable given Russia’s emissions have already fallen by more than 30per cent since 1990.
Following the end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the restructuring of the economy, the nation’s emissions dropped dramatically. But, in recent years, its emissions have been growing.
“[Russia] is basically proposing a target that would be met anyway,” says Höhne. He adds that Vietnam is also using a similar strategy.
According to CAT, Vietnam is set to “vastly overachieve its updated NDC”, as the business-as-usual emissions trajectory it is based on has been “hyper-inflated”, meaning no new policies will be required to achieve it.
Same ambition: Australia, Japan and others
Australia has faced criticism for submitting a “new” NDC without a substantial change to the old one. Therefore, it has been deemed “insufficient” by CAT.
While the new NDC states that it represents a “floor on Australia’s ambition” and that the nation “is aiming to overachieve”, energy minister Angus Taylor has said there are no plans to make a more ambitious pledge in the near future.
Other nations that have similarly made no significant changes include Switzerland and Singapore.
Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, having re-submitted their original NDCs with unchanged targets, have all announced plans to reappraise their submissions in 2021 and come forward with stronger pledges.
For the two east Asian nations, this news comes after their governments revealed plans to aim for net-zero emissions by 2050, commitments that will require new shorter term targets as well.
“I think that is a good sign of the Paris Agreement working…governments feel pressured to say ‘OK we need to do more’,” says Höhne.
How much climate finance has been requested?
Every nation that has signed up to the Paris Agreement is expected to cut its emissions, but there is an expectation that poorer nations will be helped by aid – known as “climate finance” – from richer ones.
Financing climate action is, therefore, an important component of many NDCs.
Reflecting the varying levels of detail in the NDC documents, some parties have provided precise figures for their financial requirements, while others are more vague.
The table below shows explicit mentions of international climate finance requests included in the new round of NDCs, as well as plans for domestic funding. (Carbon Brief produced a similar table of requests for international funds in the first round of NDCs in 2015.)
In the latest round, a total of $373bn in international climate financing has so far been requested by developing nations. A large chunk of this is the $236bn quoted by Ethiopia.
However, as Carbon Brief stressed in its 2015 analysis of finance requests, there are important caveats to consider when looking at the total figure. For example, the types of requests can be very varied and often not directly comparable.
Some NDCs mentioned sums of money, but did not specify whether the funds they required would be sourced domestically or internationally.
Many countries that did not include specific numbers made it clear their targets depended on some level of financial support from other countries.
Nations agreed in 2009 that they would provide climate finance of $100bn a year by 2020, primarily through the UN-backed Green Climate Fund (GCF).
The GCF has often struggled to raise enough money from richer nations. The only country that makes a specific reference to providing money to the fund in the new NDCs is Monaco.
More detail on international financial requirements will likely be revealed as more NDCs emerge in the coming months.
Fransen tells Carbon Brief that a trend she has seen with the latest NDCs is that the sums being requested are “much more robust” than the previous round. “Countries have just had a lot more time to build their capacity,” she says.
This story was published with permission from Carbon Brief.
Recycling closes the loop for a circular economy, but the more complicated the packaging design, the lower the chance of it being recycled. Could mono-material packaging be the answer to this problem?
‘Circular economy’ has become the buzzword for businesses around the world, regardless of industry. Oftentimes, the phrase is merely used for marketing purposes, with little attention paid to its concepts and principles.
There are numerous players involved in the lifecycle of one product. From raw materials suppliers and logistics companies, to manufacturers, distributors, consumers, and disposal, it may not be sufficient when only one of the players upstream creates a ‘circular product’ without involving the other players downstream to ensure that the loop can truly be closed.
Over the centuries, the human-environment relationship has grown from a circular one to a linear one. In the past, what our ancestors used to take from nature was returned to nature at the end of its life.
No material is as difficult to differentiate as plastic.
From a material scientist’s perspective, civilisation developed along with newly synthesised materials that allowed technology to flourish—materials that nature is unable to assimilate in a short period of time. Nevertheless, learning to be better stewards of materials can drive our economy back to a circular one.
For the packaging industry, the answer may lie in mono-materials.
Packaging serves a necessary function—protecting or preserving the product it contains. The material chosen for the packaging has to satisfy this basic functionality. But as products get increasingly sophisticated, more functionalities of packaging are needed and a single material may not be able to satisfy all of the requirements.
Laminations, coatings and additives went into the material formulation to achieve the packaging solution. The need for labels to print the necessary product information and branding further complicated the design. This is how a simple packaging purely used to contain a product can become a concoction of differing materials.
Recycling cannot deal with mixed materials, even for plastics.
No material is as difficult to differentiate as plastic. A transparent plastic can be polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or even general-purpose polystyrene (PS).
But these plastics cannot be mechanically recycled together and have to be separated, if not the quality of the recycled PET (which has a higher recycled value) will be downgraded or even contaminated beyond reusability.
The process of mining iron comes from extracting iron ores since iron does not exist as a pure element on earth. This requires energy input to purify the ores to obtain pure iron before it can be further used in the manufacturing of products.
The reverse engineering of products (such as recycling) into individual materials follows the same process. Recycling could be an energy-intensive activity, but it helps to close the loop for a circular economy in packaging products.
However, the more complicated a packaging design, the more effort is needed.
Unfortunately, this segregation often comes from human intervention in developing countries before the actual recycling can take place. If packaging consists of only one material, these preliminary steps can be avoided. The pathway to recycling will also be shorter and more efficient.
For the multi-layered materials that cannot be separated, either simply because it is not economically viable or not intervenable manually, the easiest method would be to take the inseparable materials and downcycle them into a composite particle board.
The only way to know if this mixture of inseparable materials is durable or even toxic is through testing it, but the composite particle board is thereafter rendered non-recyclable.
Is it possible to standardise the transparent plastic type to use for takeaways?
When it comes to determining which plastics to use for packaging, retailers are simply spoiled for choice. But when it comes to service packaging (e.g. takeaway containers), do we really need to look beyond PET and PP?
In the resin code, 7 refers to ‘others’, yet this one number encompasses many different types of plastics, and even biodegradable plastics are currently listed under ‘7’.
To determine if the plastic is recyclable or not, a consumer must know what the resin code represents, and which types of plastic can be collected—which is dependent on the local recycling infrastructure. Such in-depth knowledge may fly over the face of most consumers.
Thus, standardising which mono-material to use for a certain type of packaging—especially those with low functionality such as single-use packaging—may be the key to ensure a truly circular economy.
Plastics have great flexibility when it comes to engineering the material into the required packaging properties. Yet it is the same flexibility that results in the proliferation of plastic types that goes beyond the 7 resin identification codes.
While certain industries like automobiles or electronics would benefit from advanced plastics, comparatively, packaging for everyday items does not require the same level of complexity.
With a thorough understanding of the recycling process and infrastructure, much can be done by the packaging design engineers to mindfully create packaging for ease of recycling.
The Yuchengco Group takes a hard stance against coal power plants, but notes that the shift toward renewable energy will be very challenging.
“No more coal, no more coal. I’ll say that slowly: no more coal!”
Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) president and chief executive officer Eugene Acevedo made it clear that the Yuchengco-led bank will no longer fund coal energy projects, as the Philippines moves to cleaner energy sources.
Acevedo’s statement comes months after the Department of Energy announced that it will no longer accept new applications for greenfield coal power plants.
However, he noted that coal projects that were funded before will be on their balance sheets “for a while,” and admitted that it would be difficult for the country to rely entirely on renewables.
“It’s not to say that it will be all renewables, because the clouds can come, the waves can stop…to create a robust energy grid, there has to be a combination of renewables plus a few power plants that are rapidly ratcheted up…and those plants are usually gas-fired,” Acevedo said in a forum by the Yuchengco Group on Thursday, December 10.
PetroEnergy Resources president and chief executive officer Milagros Reyes added that while the coronavirus pandemic underscored problems with fossil fuels, particularly price volatility, the shift to green energy will remain challenging.
For instance, Reyes said that while funding for coal will be taken out, it will not necessarily go to wind, solar, or geothermal energy projects.
“It’s going to be mostly natural gas, that’s ‘deplete-able.’ But it’s clean. It’s not like coal. So like what Eugene is saying, they’ll probably be funding a lot of the LNG projects,” she said.
“However, and this is a big however, we do not expect immediate change because the fossil fuel and its products still have a big demand, but the demand will eventually scale down especially here in the Philippines.”
PetroEnergy has interests in oil exploration, geothermal, wind, and solar energy.
Reyes also noted that there are various coal-fired power plants under construction now, which will be up and running by as early as 2022.
Some Philippine banks have started to move away from funding coal projects and have set milestones in sustainable finance.
In the case of RCBC, it issued its first green bonds in 2019 amounting to $290 million or around P15 billion. It also raised P8 billion from its first peso-denominated sustainability bonds, and another $300 million in September 2019.
These bond issuances have funded a total of 9,797 green and social projects amounting to more than P56 billion.
RCBC’s sustainable lending portfolio comprised 10% of total loans as of end-September 2020.
The easiest way to irritate a senior official in India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is to ask if the government is enhancing its Paris ambition. “Why should we?” everyone from the minister to the joint secretary snaps back. “We’re the only G20 country to have met our Paris commitments. We’ve gone well beyond. Why don’t you ask the countries lecturing us to mend their own ways instead?”
Five years after the landmark Paris Agreement, climate change is gathering pace despite the pandemic-forced hiatus in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Impacts of climate change are already here for all to suffer and pledges to control emissions are still inadequate.
Hope was to be rekindled in 2020, when 195 governments and the European Union were expected to strengthen their pledges at the annual UN climate summit. Covid-19 has forced a one-year delay to that summit scheduled in Glasgow.
Altogether, it has led to shriller demands from rich countries that India – the world’s fourth-highest GHG polluter after China, the US and the EU – should announce the strengthening of its Paris pledges.
This makes the Indian government bristle in private and reiterate in public what India has been doing on the climate front. Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the recent G20 virtual summit how India has the world’s most ambitious renewable energy programme.
“We will meet our goal of 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy (RE) well before the target of 2022. Now, we are taking a big step ahead by seeking to achieve 450 gigawatts by 2030,” he promised.
Installed RE capacity is now around 78 GW, with a similar amount under construction. Observers think installed capacity will reach the 175 GW mark on time, but building of transmission lines is lagging behind.
Environment minister Prakash Javadekar repeatedly points out that international climate analysts have calculated that India is the only major economy on track to stick to pledges made to keep global temperature rise within two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
India’s mitigation pledge to reduce intensity of emission per unit of production – rather than reducing the emission itself – has helped. Industrial efficiency improvements were moving the country in that direction anyway.
Javadekar also says often that India is the only big country to add to its green cover in recent years. Most of this addition is not in forests but plantations, which does not help biodiversity.
Ministers and officials point to two initiatives launched by Modi as a sign of new action: the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in 2015 and the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) in 2019. After initial hiccups, the ISA has started some work on the ground – especially in training people from other developing countries to set up and maintain solar installations. The CDRI has received backing from most countries, but is yet to make waves.
The Indian government’s position has been strengthened by the latest report card by global climate analysts from Germanwatch, New Climate Institute and Climate Action Network. They place India 10th among the 61 largest economies who were checked to see if they are on track to meet their Paris pledges. China is 33rd and the US last.
Implementing Paris pledges
India recently set up an Apex Committee for Implementation of Paris Agreement (AIPA). Steered by the environment ministry, it has representatives from 14 ministries, in an effort to coordinate climate policies, regulate carbon markets and see how private companies are doing. The ministries include finance, agriculture, science and technology, new and renewable energy, water, power, earth sciences, health, housing and urban affairs, rural development, external affairs, commerce and industry.
As the first implementation period of the pledges made under the Paris agreement starts in 2021, the main job of the committee will be to ensure India sticks to its three promises – a 33-35 per cent reduction in emissions intensity by 2030 from 2005 levels; 40 per cent of all electricity to be generated from non-fossil fuels by 2030; and tree plantation programmes that can remove 2.5-3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent GHG from the atmosphere.
AIPA will be in charge of providing information to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on India’s progress.
The coal affair
While these steps are unexceptionable, the government gets defensive when asked why India continues to push coal-fired power plants. Not only are they the biggest GHG emitters, they are now costlier than renewable energy for much of the day. Despite that, fresh coal mining figured prominently in the government’s pandemic-recovery economic package.
The only defence one hears is that the coal industry employs millions of people. There has been no move towards encouraging these millions to take up alternate jobs. Some coal-dependent economies – such as Poland – have been seeking a “just transition”.
As host and president of the next climate summit, the British government is going to launch an Energy Transition Council, which will bring together the global political, financial and technical leadership in the power sector, and help to ensure that every country considering the energy transition can access needed support.
But there is no discussion of transition among Indian policymakers. Environmental NGOs in the country have started talking about it, but only a few and only very recently.
Serious problems with wider governance
There is no climate scepticism in India. More frequent and more severe droughts, floods, storms, forest fires, locust attacks have taken care of that. The government’s own scientists have emphasised the need to control GHG emissions.
But that has not stopped the government from seriously weakening environmental protection laws. The prime minister told the G20 summit, “We are encouraging a circular economy.” But the government is now even allowing drilling for oil and mining for coal inside once-protected forests. In the haste for post-Covid economic recovery, green options have been ignored even more than before.
The adverse impacts of such poor governance are worsened by climate change. India may be on track to fulfil its Paris pledge as far as mitigating GHG emissions is concerned, but its misgovernance of natural resources is reducing the resilience of Indians to deal with climate change impacts. Costs of adaptation are going up, and so are the loss and damage the country is suffering.
The dangers of poor governance are known, and were reiterated last year by scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when they brought out a special report on the relationship between land degradation and climate change.
The launch of that report was followed by the summit of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, hosted and presided over by India. Its main conclusion was that land has to be saved to fight climate change. India is doing the opposite.
In lieu of a climate summit
While the actual UN climate summit has been postponed, a virtual “climate dialogue” was held recently, leading up to a Climate Ambition Summit on December 12 – the anniversary of the Paris Agreement.
At the dialogue, speakers made it clear that disastrous climate change is in the offing unless all governments take immediate steps. At a session convened by the UNFCCC, scientists also warned that emissions continue to be far higher than what governments pledged in the Paris Agreement, and there is an urgent need for countries to close this gap as well as strengthen their pledges.
Current pledges are leading the world to a temperature increase of anywhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times. The world is already 1.2 degrees warmer.
Toshiba Corp. has said it will stop taking orders for new coal-fired power plants as it makes a wider push to embrace renewable energy, though it will still complete work on about 10 further facilities.
The engineering and technology giant will continue to manufacture steam turbines, offer maintenance services for existing coal-power plants and work on the construction of plants that have already been ordered.
The shift away from coal highlights differences between equipment suppliers as they move to leave the sector behind and focus on gas turbines and renewable energy.
Samsung C&T Corp. has faced criticism over its intention to complete further coal projects before quitting the fuel, while General Electric Co. said in September it will pursue an exit from its existing obligations.
The firms are under pressure amid investor demands for action on climate change and over the prospect that tighter government policy on greenhouse gas emissions will limit scope for new coal-fired plants — even in Asia, where nations currently remain reliant on the fuel as a form of cheap electricity generation.
“Demand for new coal-power plants has been dwindling,” Toshiba President Nobuaki Kurumatani said during a media briefing Wednesday. “We started considering withdrawing from new coal-plant construction in the previous fiscal year, and finally made the decision” after the government pledged last month to become greenhouse gas neutral by 2050.
Renewable energy-related investments in Japan could total as much as ¥80 trillion ($760.6 billion) over the next decade amid national efforts to lower emissions, Kurumatani estimated.
Toshiba has existing orders for the installation of coal-fired plant facilities in countries including Indonesia and India, according to details listed on its website.
Shares in the firm rose 0.8% in Tokyo trading on Wednesday. The company also released its second quarter earnings the same day, announcing an annual dividend forecast that beat analyst estimates.
Toshiba “needs to change strategy to take advantage of growth sectors,” wrote Llewelyn Hughes, an associate professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy, in an email. “Toshiba is able to make this shift because it is a diversified company, so exiting coal is not existential for them.”
The company plans to invest ¥160 billion in renewable energy for its operations through the fiscal year ending March 2023, and also aims to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, including so-called Scope 3 pollution, spokesman Takashi Ebina said Wednesday.
Toshiba aims to increase annual sales from its renewable energy business to ¥650 billion by March 2031, compared to about ¥190 billion in the most recent full year. Sales from thermal coal power and hydrogen businesses amounted to ¥222.5 billion in the year ended March 31, representing 6.6% of total sales.
A carbon sink is any reservoir – such as peatlands, or forests – that absorbs more carbon than it releases, thereby lowering the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
China is the world’s biggest source of human-produced carbon dioxide, responsible for around 28% of global emissions.
But it recently stated an intention to peak those emissions before 2030 and then to move to carbon neutrality by 2060.
The specifics of how the country would reach these goals is not clear, but it inevitably has to include not only deep cuts in fossil fuel use but ways also to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
Some tree planting has come from a desire to establish vibrant timber and paper industries
“Achieving China’s net-zero target by 2060, recently announced by the Chinese President Xi Jinping, will involve a massive change in energy production and also the growth of sustainable land carbon sinks,” said co-author Prof Yi Liu at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
“The afforestation activities described in [our Nature] paper will play a role in achieving that target,” he told BBC News.
China’s increasing leafiness has been evident for some time. Billions of trees have been planted in recent decades, to tackle desertification and soil loss, and to establish vibrant timber and paper industries.
The new study refines estimates for how much CO2 all these extra trees could be taking up as they grow.
China is engaged in large programmes to conserve and expand its forests. GETTY IMAGES
The latest analysis examined a host of data sources. These comprised forestry records, satellite remote-sensing measurements of vegetation greenness, soil water availability; and observations of CO2, again made from space but also from direct sampling of the air at ground level.
“China is one of the major global emitters of CO2 but how much is absorbed by its forests is very uncertain,” said the IAP scientist Jing Wang, the report’s lead author.
“Working with CO2 data collected by the Chinese Meteorological Administration we have been able to locate and quantify how much CO2 is absorbed by Chinese forests.”
The two previously under-appreciated carbon sink areas are centred on China’s southwest, in Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi provinces; and its northeast, particularly Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces.
The land biosphere over southwest China, by far the largest single region of uptake, represents a sink of about -0.35 petagrams per year, representing 31.5% of the Chinese land carbon sink.
A petagram is a billion tonnes.
The land biosphere over northeast China, the researchers say, is seasonal, so it takes up carbon during the growing season but emits carbon otherwise. Its net annual balance is roughly -0.05 petagrams per year, representing about 4.5% of the Chinese land carbon sink.
To put these numbers in context, the group adds, China was emitting 2.67 petagrams of carbon as a consequence of fossil fuel use in 2017.
Prof Paul Palmer, a co-author from Edinburgh University, UK, said the size of the forest sinks might surprise people but pointed to the very good agreement between space and in situ measurements as reason for confidence.
“Bold scientific statements must be supported by massive amounts of evidence and this is what we have done in this study,” he told BBC News.
“We have collected together a range of ground-based and satellite data-driven evidence to form a consistent and robust narrative about the Chinese carbon cycle.”
Artwork: The Biomass satellite is one of several new mission to refine understanding of Earth carbon budgets
Prof Shaun Quegan from Sheffield University, UK, studies Earth’s carbon balance but was not involved in this research.
He said the extent of the northeast sink was not a surprise to him, but the southwest one was. But he cautioned that new forests’ ability to draw down carbon declines with time as the growth rate declines and the systems move towards a more steady state.
“This paper clearly illustrates how multiple sources of evidence from space data can increase our confidence in carbon flux estimates based on sparse ground data,” he said.
“This augurs well for the use of the new generation of space sensors to aid nations’ efforts to meet their commitments under the Paris Agreement.”
Prof Quegan is the lead scientist on Europe’s upcoming Biomass mission, a radar spacecraft that will essentially weigh forests from orbit. It will be able to tell where exactly the carbon is being stored, be it in tree trunks, in the soil or somewhere else.
Richard Black is director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), a non-profit think-tank working on climate change and energy issues.
He commented: “With China setting out its ambition for net zero, it’s obviously crucial to know the size of the national carbon sink, so this is an important study.
“However, although the forest sink is bigger than thought, no-one should mistake this as constituting a ‘free pass’ way to reach net zero. For one thing, carbon absorption will be needed to compensate for ongoing emissions of all greenhouse gases, not just CO2; for another, the carbon balance of China’s forests may be compromised by climate change impacts, as we’re seeing now in places such as California, Australia and Russia.”
