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Tag: Circular economy

3 ways the ancient world embraced the circular economy

Posted on by dishanth
3 ways the ancient world embraced the circular economy
  • Scientists show the circular economy has roots in ancient history.
  • Broken ceramics, Roman recycling and melting down glass all happened thousands of years ago.
  • Going circular could generate as much as $4.5 trillion in economic benefits, according to the World Economic Forum.
  • The Ellen MacArthur Foundation says our current system is no longer working for businesses, people or the environment.

Think the circular economy is a novel idea that’s just come into fashion? Think again.

There’s evidence that the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle” has its origins with the Romans, Greeks or even in the Bronze Age. A circular economy is based on the principles of designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use, and regenerating natural systems, according to one of its key proponents, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which also says the idea isn’t new.

 

Modern recycling systems actually have their roots in ancient history.
Image: Ellen MacArthur Foundation

 

“The idea of feedback, of cycles in real-world systems, is ancient and has echoes in various schools of philosophy,” the Foundation says.

Here are three examples of how the ancient world embraced the circular economy:

1. Broken ceramics in Dubai 3,000 years ago

Polish scientists found tools in Dubai made from copper, bronze and iron refashioned from broken ceramic vessels. Broken ceramic vessels were not thrown away, the researchers told Science in Poland, instead they were modified and used as tools.

 

 

2. Sorting out the trash in Pompeii

The Romans also recycled, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper. Mounds of rubbish preserved after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD were “staging grounds for cycles of use and reuse,” says Professor Allison Emmerson, an American academic who works in Pompeii.

 

 

3. Glass recycling in Byzantine times

Archeologists working at the ancient city of Sagalassos, now part of Turkey, found glass chunks, fuel ash slag and kiln fragments, that indicate glass recycling, according to a paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

 

 

Even so, we should be careful not to overstate past populations’ commitment to recycling, argues Maikel Kuijpers, an assistant professor at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, on digital news site The Conversation.

“Our ancestors were no ecological saints,” he said. “They polluted their surroundings through mining, burned down entire forests, and they too created massive amounts of waste.”

And those themes are still relevant today.

A circular economy could result in as much as $4.5 trillion in economic benefits to 2030, according to the World Economic Forum. Just 8.6% of the world is currently circular, and the Forum’s work seeks to foster collaboration between private, public, civil society and expert stakeholders to accelerate the circular economy transition.

“The current system is no longer working for businesses, people or the environment,” the Ellen MacArthur Foundation says. “We must transform all the elements of the take-make-waste system: how we manage resources, how we make and use products, and what we do with the materials afterwards. Only then can we create a thriving economy that can benefit everyone within the limits of our planet.”

 

 

Written by

Emma Charlton, Senior Writer, Formative Content

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

This is the carbon footprint of your internet activity

Posted on by dishanth
This is the carbon footprint of your internet activity
  • Data centres processing and storing the world’s data already use around 1% of the electricity we generate, according to the IEA.
  • Computing is expected to account for up to 8% of global power demand by 2030.
  • The emissions associated with everyday computing could be surprisingly high.

A stone’s throw from a power station on the barren outskirts of Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, a grey warehouse surrounded by metal containers hums to the sound of money.

Inside, hundreds of computer servers work continuously to solve complicated mathematical equations generating the digital currency Bitcoin – burning enough electricity to power tens of thousands of homes in the process.

“Any high-performance computing … is energy intensive,” explained Joe Capes of global blockchain company The Bitfury Group, which operates the facility in Tbilisi.

Cryptocurrencies are one of several new technologies, like artificial intelligence and 5G networks, that climate experts worry could derail efforts to tackle global warming by consuming ever-growing amounts of power.

Data centres processing and storing data from online activities, such as sending emails and streaming videos, already account for about 1% of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

 

Sending one less ‘thank you’ email a day could save 16,433 tonnes of carbon a year.
Image: Statista

 

That’s about the same amount of electricity that Australia consumes in a year.

But as societies become more digitalised, computing is expected to account for up to 8% of the world’s total power demand by 2030, according to some estimates, raising fears this could lead to the burning of more fossil fuels.

“If we don’t take into account the carbon footprint, we are going to have a climate change nightmare coming from information technology,” said Babak Falsafi, a professor of computer and communication science at the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne.

 

Efficient Data

One solution is to improve the efficiency of data centres, which is something operators are naturally prone to do since electricity accounts for a large share of their running costs, according to data experts.

“As a rule of thumb, a megawatt costs a million dollars per year … This obviously catches management’s attention,” said Dale Sartor, who oversees the U.S. Department of Energy’s Center of Expertise for Data Centers in Berkeley, California.

Energy demand from data centres in the United States has remained largely flat over the past decade as improvements in computing have allowed processors to do more with the same amount of power, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

But that is set to change, predict tech analysts.

The 50-year-old trend known as Moore’s Law, which has seen computer chips double in capacity every two years, is expected to slow down as it becomes harder to add any more transistors to a chip.

Some companies have been looking at other ways to make savings.

In Georgia, where most electricity is generated by hydropower, Bitfury deployed a system to reduce the energy needed to cool down its heating servers.

Cooling can account for up to half of a data centre’s total energy use, the company says.

While some of its processors are still cooled with outside air, others are immersed inside metal tanks filled with a special liquid with a low boiling point.

As the liquid boils, the vapour transfers heat away from the processors, keeping them fresh and allowing the company to do away with fans and save water.

“Air is free … but it is not efficient,” explained Capes, who heads Bitfury’s liquid cooling technology subsidiary, adding that the system consumes 40% less electricity than traditional air cooling solutions.

Others have taken similar steps.

A Google data centre in Finland uses recycled seawater to reduce energy use while some companies have opened facilities near the Arctic Circle to benefit from naturally cold air.

But improving efficiency “can only get you so far”, said Elizabeth Jardim, a senior corporate campaigner at environmental group Greenpeace. “At some point you will have to address the type of energy that is powering the facility.”

Tech giants including Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft have committed to using only renewable energy but some still use fossil fuels, and more needs to be done to bring others on board, she said.

Jardim suggested governments enact policies to incentivise tech companies to procure green energy and increase transparency around the data sector’s carbon footprint.

 

Less Cat Videos

Meanwhile, internet users can also play a role by switching to greener companies or simply reducing their data use, said Jardim.

“Right now data pretty much is equivalent to energy, so the more data something takes the more energy you can assume it’s using,” she said.

Simply sending a photo by email can emit about the same amount of planet-warming gases as driving a car for a kilometre, said Luigi Carafa, executive director of the Climate Infrastructure Partnership, a Barcelona-based non-profit.

“The problem is we don’t really see this, so we don’t perceive it as a problem at all,” he said by phone.

A 2019 study by energy supplier OVO Energy found that if Britons sent one less email a day the country could reduce its carbon output by the equivalent of more than 81,000 flights from London to Madrid.

Global online video viewings alone generated as many carbon emissions as the whole of Spain in 2018, according to French think tank The Shift Project.

“People can already reduce their carbon emissions today if they stop watching cat videos,” said Falsafi, the Lausanne professor, who heads the university’s research centre for sustainable computing, EcoCloud.

“Unfortunately, they are neither aware of the issue nor incentivised to reduce carbon emissions.”

 

 

Written by

Umberto Bacchi, Journalist,

This article is published in collaboration with Reuters

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

For a true circular economy, we must redefine waste.

Posted on by dishanth
For a true circular economy, we must redefine waste.

Too often the concept of a circular economy is muddled up with some kind of advanced recycling process that would mean keeping our industrial system as it is and preserving a growing consumption model.

This idea is based on a belief that recycling will take care of everything.

One of the most startling examples of this is the part of the European Union’s Circular Economy Action Plan which aims to increase recycling rates: up to 70% of all packaging waste by 2030 and 65% of all municipal waste by 2035. In a properly built circular economy, one should rather focus on avoiding the recycling stage at all costs. It may sound straightforward, but preventing waste from being created in the first place is the only realistic strategy.

While we obviously need to continue recycling for quite some time, putting the emphasis on genuine circular innovations – that is, moving us away from a waste-based model – should be our sole objective.

 

Recycling is linear

In a linear economy, we do not account for the side-effects generated by a product once sold to an end customer. The aim is to sell a maximum number of products at minimal cost. Continuous pressure to reduce costs leads to the creation of many of these side-effects – called externalities by economists. The higher a company’s rate of production and the higher its efficiency, the more successful it will be at selling its goods in a fiercely competitive environment.

 

Here are three innovative ways to cut down on plastic waste

From building schools to buying food. 📕 Read more: https://wef.ch/2l0Veqy

Posted by World Economic Forum on Wednesday, September 25, 2019

 

This worked well in the 20th century when resources were easily available and raw material prices kept decreasing. Waste, as an economic externality, was not the producers’ responsibility. Managing waste cycles, dumping it out of sight or, at best, recycling it – but only when it was cost-effective – were under the control of our national institutions.

Visionary manufacturers, who understand the upcoming challenges of increasing their economic resilience, know better: a product that is returned for repair will cost less to fix and sell again, than manufacturing it from scratch.

In our current model, we extract resources, transform them into products, and consume or use them, prior to disposing of them. Recycling only starts at the throwing-away stage: this is a process that is not made to preserve or increase value nor to enhance materials.

We need to understand that recycling is not an effective strategy for dealing with unused resource volumes in a growth model. We will find ourselves in a never-ending pursuit of continuously generated waste, rather than seeing the avoidance of waste as a path to beneficial innovations on many levels.

Of course, it is easier to think about recycling. This avoids changing the whole of our volume-based production model. But in a world where we have to shift our consumption patterns and use less energy, recycling no longer has all the answers.

 

Recycling is ‘business-as-usual’

Since we cannot stop the volume of waste overnight, investments in the recycling industry are needed. But truly meaningful investment in developing a circular economy takes place outside of the recycling space. Indeed, the more we recycle and the more we finance recycling factories, the more we stay ‘linear’. We mistakenly believe this is the best route to solve our problems – but by staying in a recycling-based economy, we will delay the transition to an advanced circular economy.

In a circular economy, resources do not end up as recyclables since products are made to last several lifecycles. Products’ lifespans are extended via maintain, repair, redistribute, refurbishment and/or re-manufacture loops, thus they never end up in the low-value, high-need-for-energy loop: recycling.

We live in a world in dire need of disruptive innovations. Closing loops next to where customers live while avoiding waste is a short and longer-term win-win for any leading re-manufacturer. Short-term because you are in direct contact with your customers, and taking back a product that needs maintenance is an opportunity to better understand their needs and help them with additional services. Long-term because you will lower your exposure to future financial risks. Any of the feedback loops that exist prior to the recycling loop are an opportunity to take back control over your stock of resources – taking control away from the raw material markets, which may become highly volatile. Increased interactions with your customers, both commercial and financial, and an in-depth understanding of their needs, would increase customer loyalty and a business’ overall resilience.

Re-using, re-distributing and/or remanufacturing strategies are the preferred approaches in a circular economy, as they are based on parts durability. Caring for and preserving the value of product components increases corporate economic resilience, while diminishing external market risks. Whether you are acting in a highly advanced or a developing economy, these strategies make crystal-clear sense: they are less costly in the long-run because repairing a product made to last is always less expensive than producing it from scratch.

 

Leapfrogging into valued supply chains

Following this approach, we must move away from activities that devalue the material, such as recycling, and instead invest in those activities that preserve it: reuse and remanufacture. These two are especially important since they create many more secure jobs. Walter R. Stahel, the godfather of the modern circular economy, introduced the metric of labor input-per-weight ratio (man-hour-per-kg, or mh/kg) to measure job creation in relation to resource consumption. He found that the ratio of mh/kg when building a remanufactured engine from used resources compared to making the same engine from virgin materials is 270:1. The impact on employment is huge.

The re-localization and the re-sizing of activities closer to customers become critical. Production sites should migrate from a highly centralized global hub to units designed to fulfill local needs. In developed markets, a possible plan could be to develop strategic partnerships with local service providers, who can provide the infrastructure. In emerging markets, where there is often an urgent need for jobs, leapfrogging straight into a national re-manufacturing strategy is the way forward. Becoming the next ‘world factory’ hub is an obsolete vision today.

One way to start thinking like a leader in the next economy while creating jobs could be in order of priority:

– Reuse by repairing (goods) through re-hiring (people), while sharing the radical benefits (awareness) of such a model

– Redistribute by promoting access (goods) through collaboration (people), while sharing information (awareness) about this model

– Remanufacture via the ease of disassembly (goods) by training (people), while sharing the acquired knowledge (awareness) through this model

– Migration of recycling activities by diverting (goods) to service models, transferring skills (people) to remanufacturing processes (awareness).

All of the above make sense in a world where planetary limits have already hit most economies.

Adopting a circular strategy by avoiding reliance on recycling is the way forward.

This is about genuine innovation derived from genuine leadership.

This article was originally published in UNIDO’s Making It magazine

 

 

Written by

Alexandre Lemille, Co-founder and general secretary, African Circular Economy Network

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Got eco anxiety? Here are 10 reasons for climate optimism.

Posted on by dishanth
Got eco anxiety? Here are 10 reasons for climate optimism.

Last week, a report from the World Meteorological Organisation found that the world is warming faster than previously believed, and could warm by between three to five degrees Celsius by the end of the century—that’s almost three times the goal set by the Paris climate agreement.

But amid the doom and gloom, there are reasons for us to be optimistic. Even Assaad Razzouk, the outspoken chief executive of Singapore-based renewables firm Sindicatum, has started to believe there is hope for the planet. On his podcast Angry Clean Energy Guy, recorded on Thursday, Razzouk highlighted 10 reasons for climate optimism. Those reasons are as follows:

 

Climate action is intensifying

The corporate response to climate change is growing ever stronger, and governments are finally responding too, prompted by a global upswell in climate activism.

“Do you think the point of the Extinction Rebellion protests is to close roads? Or that Greta Thunberg travels by boat because she wants to save fuel? Of course not. The point is to increase awareness about the climate emergency. And, boy, have they been successful,” said Razzouk on his podcast.

 

Cost reductions [of renewables] have basically taken fossil fuel power out of the game. It’s just that some countries don’t know that yet.
Assaad Razzouk, chief executive, Sindicatum Sustainable Resources

 

Among the big corporates to think harder about reducing their impact are Kellogg’s, the cereal company, which aims to train 500,000 American farmers in techniques that lower greenhouse gas emissions, and the big tech giants Facebook, Google and Apple, which want to only use renewables to power their energy-guzzling data centres.

In Southeast Asia, the only region in the world where coal is growing in the energy mix, the regional bloc’s three biggest banks, UOB, DBS and OCBC, all declared in an unprecedented 11 days for corporate climate action in May that they would all stop funding new coal-fired power plants.

As for consumers, the demand for green products is another reason for the eco anxious to quit the Xanax. According to study by market research group Nielsen, a quarter of all store sales in the United States will be from sustainable products by 2021.

Meanwhile, governments including Ireland, the United Kingdom, California and the European Union, which recently declared a state of climate emergency, have taken bold leaps to curb emissions. In Asia Pacific, the leader is New Zealand. The government has passed a law to cut carbon emissions to almost zero by 2050, go 100 per cent renewables by 2035, plant one billion trees and invest $15 billion in transit, biking and walking infrastructure.

Oil and gas cost of capital is rising

The cost of capital for oil and gas is growing, which has meant that the market value of America’s energy sector not only fell this year, but the whole sector is now worth less than Apple’s stock, Razzouk said.

He pointed to the downgrading of the credit rating of Exxon Mobil, one of the world’s biggest (mostly oil) energy companies, as a result of the rising cost of gas extraction, and the nose-dive in market value of fracking giant Chesapeake over the last decade (down 98 per cent), as signs that the era of fossil fuels dominance is coming to an end.

“Over the next few years, Big Oil will find it increasingly hard and increasingly expensive to finance new projects,” said Razzouk.

Renewables costs are still falling

The costs for renewable energy tech fell to a record low last year, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency, with the biggest fall in solar, down by 26 per cent.

Razzouk pointed to bids to build solar parks in Dubai, which have seen costs plummet by 71 per cent in five years, and a 31 per cent fall in the cost of offshore wind—now the cleanest and cheapest baseload power in the world—in the UK in two years, as evidence that costs are continuing to fall for clean energy.

“These cost reductions have basically taken fossil fuel power out of the game. It’s just that some countries don’t know that yet,” said Razzouk.

Transport is going electric—fast

The number of public charging points for electric vehicles has increased five-fold in four years, from less than 200,000 in 2015 to 1m in 2019, the price of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 87 per cent in a decade, and cities are being redesigned away for electric vehicles, Razzouk noted.

And automative manufacturers have finally caught on. According to Razzouk’s calculations, 84 models are being rolled out over the next two years from the likes of Volkswagen (VW), Audi, Porsche, Mercedes, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Range Rover and Jaguar, and automakers such as BMW, VW, General Motors and Peugeot are now offering electric scooters and electric bicycles, not just cars.

 

We are winning [the climate fight]. For now, slowly, slowly, but soon we’re going to be winning all of a sudden.

 

“The transition to electric cars would have been a lot less painful for the car industry if it had spent the last decade preparing for it instead of fighting it. So today they’re laying off people when they shouldn’t have, had they been thinking.”

But the electric mobility revolution is not just about cars. Taiwanese electric bicycle firm Giant is selling 600,000 units a year, while there are 100 different electric planes in development.

Perhaps most promising of all is that new technology enables electric vehicles to supply energy back to the grid, rather than suck from it.

“There’s an emerging technology called vehicle-to-grid (V2G), and that allows a plug-in vehicle to act as a form of energy storage. So the batteries in your car can be used to let electricity flow from the car to the distribution network and back,” Razzouk said.

Climate litigation

According to Columbia Law School, there are 1,640 lawsuits fighting fossil fuel companies and governments over climate change right now.

“Even though we are in a planetary emergency, we are fighting back,” said Razzouk, who noted that climate lawsuits are exposing the “misinformation and obfuscation” of Big Oil, which has long known of the impact of their operations on the climate.

“The wheels of justice are slow and sadly, justice maybe cannot be guaranteed to prevail in some countries, but the sheer number of lawsuits and the dedication, commitment, and passion I’ve seen from those launching them is a big cause for optimism,” Razzouk said.

Banks are waking up to the climate reality

Beyond credit ratings agency Moody’s considering stripping Exxon Mobil of its triple-A rating, the European Central Bank is considering including climate considerations in how it conducts its monetary policy. “Now that would be a huge move because central banks are by far the biggest influence on financial markets,” said Razzouk.

Monetary policies, Razzouk explained, have an implicit “carbon bias” because carbon exposure is almost irrelevent for normal credit ratings. If that changed, financial markets would stop mispricing climate risks—which would be a huge lever for change, he said.

The war on plastic

A report from the International Energy Agency, released in October 2018, found that plastic and other petrochemicals are becoming the biggest driver of global oil demand—ahead of cars, planes and trucks—and will make up nearly half of oil demand by 2050.

But the global fight against plastic pollution could put a big dent in oil demand, Razzouk said.

This drop in demand will have consequences for the cost of capital of oil and gas companies. This means that they will be able to do no more new oil and gas exploration and close down, gradually, Razzouk suggested.

Reforestation

Though forest fires have raged in Indonesia, the Amazon, California and Australia this year, many countries around the world are building forest fortresses to lock in carbon and safeguard water resources, and there are now more protected nature and marine areas than at any time in history.

China, India and Pakistan are rolling out massive tree-planting schemes, Ethiopia recently planted 350 million trees in a single day as part of an initiative to plant four billion trees, and in Western Europe, forests have grown by an area larger than Switzerland in a decade.

Peak emissions

After increasing at the fastest rate for seven years in 2018, global carbon emissions are set to rise much more slowly this year, according to data from the Global Carbon Project.

The global economy grew by 3.5 percent per year, but emissions grew by only 0.8 per cent per year, Razzouk pointed out. “Now that’s still a disaster because they [emissions] are growing. But the growth phase is slower. We’ve seen a 1.5 per cent increase in 2017, 2.1 per cent in 2018 and now it’s dropped to 0.8 per cent.”

“One more push by all of us, and we will set off on a downward slope for emissions,” he said.

Citizen activism

Even just a year ago, it couldn’t reasonably be believed that much of the world really cared about the climate crisis, Razzouk said.

Now though, he said, he sees much more commitment to tackle the climate emergency.

“We have activist lawyers, activist teachers, activist unionists, activist engineers, activist consultants, and activist politicians. We even have some activist bankers. We even have some activist oil and gas professionals working at changing the oil and gas fat cats from the inside. And most important of all, we have activist citizens everywhere I look.”

Clilmate solutions are available, and slowly but surely, they are being implemented, and soon they will be as ubiquitous as our mobile phones, he said.

“We are winning [the climate fight]. For now, slowly, slowly, but soon we’re going to be winning all of a sudden,” said  Razzouk, who started his podcast by declaring that a friend recently unfollowed him on Twitter, because he found his tweets to be “too depressing.”

Singapore-based renewables executive Assaad Razzouk is the creator of the Angry Clean Energy Guy podcast series, and has 137,000 followers of his environment-themed Twitter account.

 

 

By Robin Hicks

www.eco-business.com

Do ‘environmentally responsible’ products help the planet? Or do they just get us to buy more stuff?

Posted on by dishanth
Do ‘environmentally responsible’ products help the planet? Or do they just get us to buy more stuff?

Abbey Dufoe, a 28-year-old web producer in New Jersey, cares about the environment. On the weekends, she and her partner go on beach hikes and pick up trash. She buys in bulk to reduce packaging waste and tries to recycle as much as she can.

She is also a fan of “green” products like metal straws, tote bags and reusable water bottles, and buys her clothes and shoes from companies that claim to make environmentally and socially conscious products. And, as much as she can, Dufoe tries not to use disposable items in order to reduce her contribution to our planet’s burgeoning plastic waste problem.

“It’s basically just about lowering my footprint,” Dufoe says, “because I know I have to buy this stuff anyway.”

Or does she? One of the big criticisms facing the practice of conscious consumerism — purchasing environmentally and socially responsible products — is whether, in the name of sustainability, we sometimes end up buying even more stuff. Take Dufoe’s reusable straw. She says it’s easy to keep clean and to remember to carry with her. However, she admits, she also has a couple of other reusable straws at home.

“We are putting more materials out into the world,” says Emma Rose Cohen, CEO and founder of Final Straw, a company that sells the colorful, foldable metal straw Dufoe carries with her. “There is the irony of buying something to reduce consumption.” Plus, she adds, thanks to the proliferation of cheap knockoffs of her product, “inadvertently, we actually created a tonne of additional waste because of these knock-offs. It wasn’t our direct waste, but still.”

Indeed, the idea of being more environmentally friendly by producing more stuff feels counterintuitive to some. “The notion of shopping for salvation turns my stomach,” Richard Heede, director of the Climate Accountability Institute, wrote in an email. “We cannot exorcise the climate demon by buying more stuff.”

Cohen, however, sees the role of the consumer as an important one. “There needs to be shared responsibility,” she says. “As consumers we do have way more power than we think.”

Dufoe is familiar with the dilemma. It can be hard to draw the line between simply taking the purchases she would have made anyway and choosing sustainable options and using sustainability as an excuse to purchase more things. As an ambassador for several ethical clothing brands, she gets discount codes in exchange for posting social media photos of herself wearing their products or participating in activities such as trash cleanups.

“The temptation is there to buy something,” she admits. “The good news is, I already have everything from these brands.”

Disposable vs. renewable

In addition to reusable straws, another popular choice when it comes to green products is the reusable tote bag, used in lieu of piling one’s groceries into yet another flimsy plastic or paper shopping bag. I have a drawer full of them, some that I bought, and some that I got for free from conferences, magazines and events. They feel like a guilt-free purchase. Sure, I tell myself, you’re buying a new bag, but you’re going to use it in the place of who knows how many disposable plastic bags that would have ended up in a landfill or the ocean.

However, a study from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency looked at the environmental impacts of different types of shopping bags and found that it takes a lot more resources to make a tote bag than a polyethylene one.

One cotton tote bag, for example, would need to be used more than 7,000 times just to meet the environmental performance of a disposable plastic bag. However, this calculation does not include the environmental impact of the bags’ disposal — meaning that all those plastic bags that are potentially kept out of the oceans because of using a reusable tote aren’t factored in.

“The decisions are just really complicated,” says Matthew Wilkins, a biologist at Vanderbilt University who wrote an article for Scientific American on plastic pollution and has been on podcasts like 99 per cent Invisible to discuss the problem of plastics and recycling. “Because maybe one thing uses less plastic, but it’s more water intensive.”

 

The notion of shopping for salvation turns my stomach. We cannot exorcise the climate demon by buying more stuff.

Richard Heede, director, Climate Accountability Institute

 

Good for the environment?

So are green products a good thing for the environment? It’s hard to say. There’s an argument to be made that at the very least, they raise awareness and give people who want to make a difference a good place to begin.

“If you can start with something really easy and start somewhere where behavior changes are not very difficult, then you can convince people that larger challenges can be as easily tackled,” Cohen says.

Nik Sawe, a neuroscientist specialising in environmental decision-making at Stanford University, says that purchasing products that claim to be environmentally friendly allows people to participate in environmentalism without causing themselves too much discomfort.

Considering how to act ethically in an environmental context requires people to confront the gravity and scale of the problem — which can feel overwhelming and, according to Sawe, actually cause them not to act. A more positive experience, on the other hand, is more likely to spur action.

“If you have guilt, you’ll get self-conscious,” Sawe says. “But if you feel like a third party is doing these things that are damaging the environment, it’s a lot easier to mobilise and get pissed about it.”

In this case, the third party is the restaurant giving you a plastic straw or the supermarket double-bagging your gallon of milk. By buying a reusable straw or carrying a tote bag, consumers can feel like they’re making a difference.

However, recent research from the University of Arizona says that it might be more complicated than that. According to the study, buying less actually makes people happier, whereas buying green products did not make consumers feel better.

“Reduced consumption has effects on increased well-being and decreased psychological distress,” said lead author Sabrina Helm in a release about the study, “but we don’t see that with green consumption.”

It’s also possible that by doing something small, you’ll feel as though you’ve done something for the environment and not pursue further action.

“Everybody has a limited bandwidth for fighting the status quo,” says Wilkins. “If this is how they’re using it, then it’s misplaced.”

Not only that, but a recent study by University of California, San Diego, neuroeconomist Uma Karmarkar and New York University associate professor of marketing Bryan Bollinger looking at consumption habits among people who brought reusable bags for grocery shopping found that making a moral or “good” decision in one domain appeared to give people license to make more indulgent decisions in another — for example, purchasing more than they otherwise might have.

However, Karmarkar and Bollinger also found that because a reusable bag constantly signals to a shopper that they are doing something environmentally friendly, it might lead them to buy organic produce or cage-free eggs to solidify their good standing.

Sawe also cautioned that a product that might be environmentally friendly in one way — for example, by saving energy — can convey the impression that it is environmentally friendly in other ways as well, for example by being biodegradable or recyclable. But this is not necessarily the case.

Furthermore, some think this entire discussion is moot, claiming that the impact of individual purchases pale in the face of the massive environmental challenges we face, and argue that larger and systemic changes are needed. In Heede’s words, “screw the straws, and do something serious.”

Dufoe sees the answer somewhere in between. “We can do all these things personally, but there are definitely bigger things we can tackle.” Still, she says, deciding how to make a difference remains a struggle. “It’s hard to not fell guilty.”

This story was written by Stephanie Parker and published with permission from Ensia.com

 

Source: https://www.eco-business.com/

Coke, Nestlé and Pepsi top plastic polluter audit again as green groups slam recyclable packaging as ‘false solution’.

Posted on by dishanth
Coke, Nestlé and Pepsi top plastic polluter audit again as green groups slam recyclable packaging as ‘false solution’.

Food and beverage firms Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo are the world’s biggest plastic polluters, a study of litter found on beaches, streets, homes, and parks in 50 countries has revealed.

The same firms have topped the global plastic polluter audit, conducted by a collective of environmental groups running cleanup operations, for the second year in succession.

This is despite initiatives the multi-national consumer goods companies have launched to address the chronic plastic pollution problem they have contributed to.

Coca-Cola has launched recyclable bottles made entirely from renewable plant-based materials, aiming to use it in all its packaging by next year. Nestlé has a plan to make all of its packaging recyclable or reusable by 2025, while Pepsi has pledged to develop bottles made from renewable resources.

 

Coke uses PlantBottle packaging, which are bottles made from plants, saves the equivalent annual emissions of more than 315,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, Coke estimates.
Image: Coca-Cola

 

But these measures do not address the root of the problem – the overuse of plastic by consumer goods firms – and so have not affected their standing in the global litter audit, the campaigners noted.

“Commitments by corporations like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo to address the crisis unfortunately continue to rely on false solutions like replacing plastic with paper or bioplastics and relying more heavily on a broken global recycling system,” said Abigail Aguilar, plastic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the lead group for the Break Free From Plastic campaign, in a media briefing on Wednesday.

“We call them false solutions because they perpetuate the throwaway culture that caused the plastic pollution crisis, and will do nothing to prevent these brands from being named the top polluters again in the future.”

As part of Break Free From Plastic, a global movement of non-governmental organisations advocating against new plastic production, Greenpeace orchestrated 4,384 cleanups in over 50 countries from August 1 to September 30, picking up 476,423 pieces of plastic. Almost half of the plastic waste was marked with a clear consumer brand.

Other companies identified in the study included Mondelez International, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Philip Morris International and Perfetti van Melle.

 

The world’s top 10 biggest plastic polluters in 2019.
Image: Break Free From Plastic.

 

Von Hernandez, global coordinator of Break Free from Plastic, called on corporations to reduce their production of single-use plastic, instead of using recycling or recyclable packaging as a solution.

He cited a 2017 study that found that 8.3 billion metric tonnes of plastic trash have been produced since 1950, but only 9 per cent of it has been recycled globally.

“Even if all plastic packaging were collected to be recycled, it would only be down-cycled or transformed into another inferior product that inevitably becomes waste, ending up in incinerators and landfill, polluting our oceans,” Hernandez said.

“Over the next 30 years, the amount of plastic waste is set to quadruple,” he warned.

A call for ‘alternative delivery systems’

Environmentalists urged the consumer goods companies to invest in different ways to package their products that do not create pollution.

 

unilever hair refilling station

Unilever’s hair refilling station in a mall at the Makati Central Business District in the Philippines.
Image: Unilever

 

Unilever, which ranked as the fifth largest polluter in the audit, launched a shampoo and conditioner refilling station in three high-traffic malls in Metro Manila, Philippines in March.

The hair and skincare giant, which owns brands such as Dove, Sunsilk, and Lux, sells many of its products in single-use plastic sachets in developing countries like the Philippines and Indonesia to make its products more affordable.

While environmentalists lauded Unilever’s intiative, they said consumers in the lower income bracket who mostly use single-use sachets will not use the refilling stations.

“It’s a step in the right direction, but malls especially in the central business district are not that accessible to the common Filipino. In our dialogue with the companies, we told them that if they are to invest and introduce an alternative [to plastics], they need to position them where they are easily accesible, like in sari-sari (retail) stores or public markets,” Aguilar said.

“Solutions must be affordable, simple, convenient, durable, and non-toxic,” he said.

 

Source: www.eco-business.com