Greenwashing Debunkers Club

Julio F. Campos Since the invention of Bakelite in 1907 plastic residues or products has being cumulatively thrown into rivers, and consequently oceans.  The consequence is that today there is not a single beach in the world where plastic debris is not present. After the air pollution, this is probably our second global presence footprint.      For over a hundred year we are polluting the oceans, but the problem of the great garbage patches in Pacific hit the press and social media in the last few years the problem gained public attention. That it was discovered back in 1988 and we stood for years without caring about it is of little concern. The first large scale attempt to deal with the problem and try to remove the plastic was conceived by Boyan Slat back in 2011, who started a crowdfunding initiative and it is s yet on prototype testing phase, still years from being 24/7 effective on real open sea conditions. Due to lack of investment. ...

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...

Sustainability roots are the words “ability” and “sustain”, therefore the ability to sustain. In the case of ecological sustainability, the ability to sustain a ecological system or social sustainability, as the ability to sustain a social system. The idea of sustainability has become over the years so disseminated through so many different areas and so little attention has been given to its real meaning that it is often confused with the traditional definition of sustainable development, i.e., use our resources without compromise the needs of future generations, which is the result of sustainability. To fully understand this “ability to sustain” it must be brought back some dimensions to the concept that are related to how long that ability can be maintained, how it is maintained   or lost, and the systemic configuration need for its existence. This paper brings back the sustainability concept to its more broad definition and some considerations on how the lack i...