I tend to approach things environmental from a standpoint of candid naivety. I don’t have a degree in the subject, I’m not a scientist in any other discipline and most of my opinions are based on personal experience. But then again, I can speak for a large proportion of the population that, like me, is confused and exhausted by the climate debate dialogue.
I recently became involved with some recycling projects, most of which revolved around plastic. The first was a recycling centre that had been set up in Zoo Lake, a potentially beautiful park here in Johannesburg, but worse than a landfill site after a weekend of picnicking and whatever else people do in green spaces.
The recycling centre was my first encounter with the term Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR), the motivation, I was told, for Coke’s sponsorship of the infrastructure. EPR puts the environmental responsibility for the production of a product back with the producer. For companies like Coke, this means they have to either pay for or offset the environmental impact of first producing and then disposing of the plastic bottles their drinks are sold in.
It sounds good, and certainly would be if lawyers weren’t able to magnify the most minuscule of loopholes. EPR isn’t a problem, they told the directors of Coke-Cola and others of their ilk, you just need to fund things that earn plastic credits, which will bring down your overall plastic score so that you can keep on producing as usual.
I’ve no idea how many credits a recycling centre brings, but I visualize a set of old-fashioned brass scales, two flat trays with a pile of bad plastic items in one and a pile of good plastic credits in the other. In the middle, an anonymous hand adds a little more to each side until the perfect balance is achieved and the shareholders are happy. Yes, what I’m saying maybe over-simplistic and cynical, but it’s not far from the truth. If you don’t believe me, then read this:
A plastic credit is a transferable certificate representing the collection of a specified weight (e.g. one kilogram, one metric ton) of plastic waste recovered or recycled that would otherwise have ended up in the natural environment. Plastic credits can be purchased by organizations and other end users to take action on their plastic footprint.
Source: https://repurpose.global/blog/post/what-are-plastic-credits
The last sentence is the spoiler — companies can buy plastic credits to reduce their plastic footprint. That’s right, you’re with me (I hope). If companies want to keep on doing what they’ve been doing, however polluting and detrimental to every living being on this planet, they just need to sponsor a recycling centre or pay some bursaries, or anything else they can pick off the credit list. My suspicions about this duplicitous charade were entirely confirmed when I attended a presentation by a waste collection NGO.
“The more we collect, the more we earn!” we were told by a man, whose wildly gesticulating arms were apparently controlled by a power stronger than his own. And then, just in case we weren’t entirely convinced, he flashed up a series of PowerPoint slides to illustrate a line of incrementally scaled pyramids of annual growth, based on the plastic credits earned and paid for by the sponsors. His dream is to see the scheme operate over the whole of South Africa, employing thousands of informal waste pickers and presumably making his organization wealthier. The nightmare is that this would require a continuous supply of waste plastic. Business as usual. Business unchanged.
If you’ve got the gist of what I’m telling you, it shouldn’t be too difficult to take this one step further to the carbon footprint that we’re all told we should be reducing. I’ll set the scene by revealing that BP, the petroleum company, first thought up the concept, with all the would-be greeners like me following in hot pursuit until some of us saw the light, or dark. What were the motives of those men in suits at the top? Environmental? Philanthropic? Concern for the future of the world and their own grandchildren? Wrong, wrong and wrong again. The carbon footprint puts the carbon responsibility firmly back on us, the bad people who want to fly to faraway lands, drive cars to work, heat our homes, power IT systems in our schools and machines in our hospitals. Bad, bad, bad, now go away and offset the carbon you have emitted by planting trees, eating locally, changing your diet, and doing all the other things that make you feel less guilty and leave us free to keep on doing what we do best — burning and converting fossil fuels for profit.
It sounds like a conspiracy theory, and in a way it is. A conspiracy conspired since 1977, when James Black, a senior scientist with Exxon Oil, delivered this sobering message:
There is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels. Current thinking holds that man has a time window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.
Nothing changed, the digging, drilling and burning went on, and then in 2015, Allan Jeffers, spokesperson for Exxon said:
“We didn’t reach those conclusions, nor did we try to bury them.”
Source: Hall, S. (2015, October 26). Exxon Knew about Climate Change almost 40 Years Ago. Scientific American.
But now it’s time for us to start burying, and I’m not talking about our heads. Let’s bury the lies and uncover the truths. Let’s think about what we are told and start asking the questions that will inevitably hurt… someone.
Not all of us have the time or freedom to worry about whether a credit, plastic or carbon, is real or not. That’s probably because the people who do have the capacity have taken it away from the rest who don’t. But you, the person reading this article, do so from the more privileged side of the fence, so why not take time out to test your assumptions, the kind you’ll hear from media outlets and echoed in podcasts? Start challenging the people who create them, and join the people who know much more than me to force through the real alternative options that our planet needs.
