Greenwashing Debunkers Club

Julio F. Campos This article is dedicated to expose how the carbon credit market helps companies evade their responsibilities to the environment and the health of society in their environment. Nowadays when a corporation talks about environmental sustainability the first results presented is the reduction in carbon emissions. Although some of them achieve that reduction by moving to renewable sources but presenting only the results with higher reductions, not the whole life cycle, many use the carbon market to calculate their emissions reductions. The principle behind the carbon market is simple, the company A emits X tons of carbon, the company B grow biomass that sequesters that X tons, generating carbon credits. Company A buys company B carbon credits and neutralizes its carbon emissions. As exemplified by Dr. Katharine Hayhoe an interesting analogy to understand how this can be made is: Imagine that person A wants to loose weight and pays person B to go to...

Julio F. Campos The circular economy for some years has been emerging as an alternative proposal to the current production model being embraced by a growing number of governments and companies. Its concept is to introduce into the production system feedback mechanisms similar to those existing in natural systems, eliminating the linear explore-produce-discard characteristic in favor of a structure based on reuse and recycling cycles, thus reducing both the volume of discarded waste and the of exploited natural inputs. Basic model of the structure of the Circular Economy Encompassing different initiatives, such as cradle-to-cradle , biomimetics or industrial ecology , in this scenario the environment would cease to be a mere reservoir of resources/waste, but an adjunct to the economic process, providing proposals for the development of sustainable economic solutions. However, when we have in mind the finite characteristic of our planet resources, for the circular econ...

Julio F. Campos Corporations are based on three pillars when presenting their solutions aiming at achieving sustainability: Increase efficiency and use of new technologies; Recycling of waste for reuse and; Change in the production process for the use of renewable and clean sources. Although corporations depend on these approaches to maintain their financial health in the face of an increasing demand for sustainability, we will see that from the environmental and social point of view, these solutions can often be mere palliatives and can not be sustainable if there is, in fact, no reduction in exploitation resources. Increase Efficiency Paradox William Stanley Jevons, in 1865, as postulated in "The Question of Coal," observed that as less coal was used to produce a single product, due to the increase in the efficiency of its use, the surplus coal allowed the expansion the production of that particular product, or other products, with lower prod...

Julio F. Campos Bioplastics have occupied a prominent place in the petrochemical industry as the solution to the problem of dependence on fossil fuels. Moreover, the strong environmental appeal due to its natural renewable origin makes it the main product in the sustainability policy debate. Its Life Cicle Analysis, however, shows that the truth is just the opposite. Their production demands uniformity of raw material, which can only be obtained (to meet the market demand) through large scale monocultures, which are responsible for their implementation, among other impacts, for the extinction of local biodiversity (irreversible), To which it only increases as demand for productive area increases. It can be argued that waste or by-products from agricultural processes are used, and therefore no significant impact is added to the stage of production of the raw material. It is important to remember that both the gasoline was waste discarded from the production of kerosene unti...