Greenwashing Debunkers Club

Julio F. Campos Throughout human history, the careless use of natural resources has proven to result in catastrophic shifts to many civilizations. Overuse of natural resources is known to have played the major role in the collapse of ancient civilizations. Easter Island, being the most famous of them, presents the ultimate example of how the mindless use of local, limited, resources could drive the end of an entire civilization. The Mayans overpopulation and deforesting and overexploitation of local land, with a resulting drought, are another example of how the belief in the resources infinitude can lead a pungent civilization to disaster. Angkor Wat, one of the most advanced Asian ancient civilizations, with is marvelous water control systems, upon which the entire civilization relied, collapsed due to external climate events leading to floods and droughts, resulting in the end of this entire civilization. Even the great Roman empire was at the end subject to its soil...

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...