Greenwashing Debunkers Club

Julio F. Campos Originally published in 2018 Recently  Ambev presented its product AMA, which is nothing more than bottled water with a sustainability appeal based on the proposal to donate 100% of its profit from the product sale as a Cause Marketing approach (How Cause Marketing is another way to divert attention to the real problem of consumerism and its hidden costs, as keep consumers consuming or “pretending” to aid to solve a problem created by the market itself, won’t be discussed here). What will be discussed is: a) does a company such as Ambev needs to create a new product to present itself as sustainable?; b) how sustainable it really is when it comes to water, probably the most valuable natural resource today? AMA As stated AMA is a brand of bottled water which has 100% of its profit donated to a program aimed to deliver water to isolated communities in Brazil. With a US$0.54 / 500 ml price tag, it fits within market range for bottled waters.    With a w

Julio F. Campos The latest trend in the fashion industry,  sustainability is on the hype and widely celebrated by fashion corporations, concerned consumers, designers and whoever wants to save the planet. However, if the electronics industry is the father of planned obsolescence, fashion is doubtless the mother, releasing season after season new collections to allow the engaged audience to keep up with the last tendencies.  Who wants to be kept out of the latest tendencies after all? Like all the other movements towards sustainability, those engaged with the fashion also follows the same set of beliefs used by the rest of business. Optimize the production process to reduce its impact, and; Recycle. So the actions are focused on the start and the end of the process. But is that all? That's the most relevant question and to answer that it is necessary to bring to the reader the statement that explains why those actions are not enough and usually are not as go

Julio F. Campos I have been quite often asked questions about pollution. What it is, it's different types, what products are considered to be pollutants, how the environment deals with it or what can we do to prevent it. Here I'll briefly answer those questions explaining what pollution from the ecological perspective is. How, why, when an ecosystem is considered polluted and what can it do about it. But first, it is necessary to bring two fundamental ecosystem structural characteristics. A) The carrying capacity Carrying capacity is the capacity of any ecosystem to sustain a number of individuals of a given species. That could the number of different species, the number of predators, the volume of human use of its resources and, as we will see, the quantity of waste that it can process through its recycling species. As such, every ecosystem has an intrinsic set of carrying capacities for its innumerous species which are derived from its complex internal inter

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. As the subject got

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