Corporate sustainability news you may have missed: Part 6
FREAKING OUT
Cocoa supply chains have seen a rise in child workers. There were more than 2.1 million children engaging in hazardous work in the sector last season in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire; West African countries that produce 60% of the world’s cocoa.
This is according to a report funded by the US Department of Labour. This level of child workers is higher than in 2010 — the year when big companies like Mars, Nestle, Hershey’s all pledged to reduce child labour by 70% in 2020. It’s now 2020 but neither conditions nor numbers of child workers have improved.
The problem with child workers is multi-faceted. Firstly, children are either trafficked or work as a way to support their families. The average age is between 12 and 16, although there are many children under 12 working. Conditions are considered hazardous with 50% of children reporting injuries. They spray toxic pesticides on crops without any protective gear, lift very heavy loads of cocoa pods, and use dangerous tools such as machetes. Aside from the actual conditions, the fact that they are working means that they are not going to school — negatively impacting their future livelihoods.
So all these companies are definitely not on track to reach this goal — as acknowledged by Richard Scoby, the head of the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF), an industry group representing companies like Nestle and Hershey. However, there are still beacons of hope. For instance, the International Cocoa Initiative, a multistakeholder initiative, has claimed to have reduced child labour by half in the areas in which it operates. They have done this through community development activities, educational actions like helping 1,548 children enrol in schools, supply chain child labour monitoring, and remediating which has benefited at least 16,000 children. If you’re looking to make a difference in your chocolate purchasing decisions here are a few tips.
- REVIEW brands on wherefrom and in the “Tell the CEO” section let brands know that you want your chocolate to be child labour free or at the very least for brands to actually reach their targets (which they had 10 years to plan and deliver on!!)
- Buy from alternative brands that make more of an effort to change business as usual and transparently report on that. For instance, Tony’s Chocolonely is a great alternative because it produces delicious chocolate (an obvious must) but most importantly because it is on a mission to have 100% slave-free chocolate. In order to do so, the company invests in long-term partnerships with farmer cooperatives, it pays cocoa farmers a higher price and helps train them in agricultural knowledge to improve productivity. Plus all its cocoa is traceable and they report on this transparently so the whole world can see where its chocolate comes from. Check out our Instagram post on Tony’s Chocolonely and also REVIEW the brand via our platform!
Tearfund’s new report outlines the end-of-life impact of Nestlé, Unilever, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo’s single-use plastics in six low-and-middle-income countries: China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, and Nigeria. The report outlines that these four companies are responsible for more than half a million tonnes of plastic pollution every year in those six countries alone. That’s the equivalent of 83 football pitches covered every day.
On top of that, burning these plastics caused the release of 4.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide across the six countries. Preventing these emissions would be equivalent to taking 2 million cars off UK roads.
Unilever and Nestlé scored highest in terms of their commitments to reduce their plastic footprints in these developing countries. The main culprits were Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, with the report claiming their commitments were significantly falling short of what is needed to tackle their enormous amounts of plastic pollution.
Tearfund outlines how these multinationals can take action. Firstly, they call for the businesses to report by 2020, the number of units and volume of single-use plastic products they use and sell in each country. Secondly, they call for these companies to reduce this amount by half, country by country, by 2025, and instead use environmentally sustainable delivery methods such as refillable or reusable containers. Thirdly, they call for the companies to recycle the single-use plastics that they sell in low-and middle-income countries, ensuring that by 2022 one is collected for every one sold. This would be part of adequate systems for collection, reuse, recycling and composting in communities that currently lack these systems. Finally, they call for the companies to restore dignity by working in partnership with waste pickers to create safe jobs, thereby establishing collection and recycling systems that are good for society and the environment.
So it’s not just about reporting and reducing the number of plastics — especially in countries that have poor waste management — but it’s also about completely rethinking the need for single-use plastics, following the waste hierarchy and moving to a refill/reuse model.
The report also includes some useful insight on the issues with bioplastics as an alternative, why we can’t truly rely on recycling, as well as what governments and citizens can do to reduce single-use plastics.
Let’s talk about Google. This is not so much “bad” news per se, but rather a more nuanced issue. Whilst the company has found a one of a kind way of maximising its renewable energy usage for its data centres, it has also been at the centre of critique with regards to the sheer amount of water the company requires to cool these data centres.
Firstly, the good news is that Google has recently developed an intelligent way of shifting non-urgent computing in its data centres to occur in the times in which renewable energy is more abundant (think, when the sun is shining and when the wind is blowing). They call this new tech: Carbon-Intelligent Computing. As Radanovic, the Technical Lead for Carbon-Intelligent Computing, claims, “results from our pilot suggest that by shifting compute jobs we can increase the amount of lower-carbon energy we consume.” So that’s really awesome because it helps Google ACTUALLY use renewable energy, rather than simply matching its energy usage with 100% renewable energy purchases. It’s also really awesome because it is the first solution of its kind and can help inspire other huge businesses with similar energy-guzzling data centres to also use this kind of technology.
It would be nice to just report on this really innovative news, however, Google’s good news comes at the same time as some devastating news: its data centres require billions of gallons of water to maintain. For example, in 2019, Google requested (or was granted) more than 2.3 billion gallons of water for data centres in only three different states in the US. What’s worse, often Google will operate in dry regions that struggle to conserve water. The Bloomberg report looks specifically at the town Mesa in Arizona, with which Google has a deal allowing it to use 1 million gallons a day to cool the data centre, with all the water coming from the drought-prone Colorado River. Arizona has been in a state of drought for over 20 years, as per Arizona Municipal Water Users Association, an advocate on water issues in the area.
In relation to the good news about Google having more energy efficiency in its data centres, the article explains that there are trade-offs between water and energy use. For example, in the data centres, there are stacked processing units which need to be cooled down. A common system would use energy-intensive “computer room air conditioners”, however, Google relies on evaporative cooling in which evaporated water cools the air. That means that Google uses less energy, but more water.
However, if you look at Google’s 2019 sustainability report, the company does have some sustainable water management practices in its data centres, notably in Finland where it uses seawater and in Belgium where it uses industrial canal water. This is a challenge that Google is aware of and in time will find ways to lead itself and others to alternative methods of cooling that don’t require the depletion of precious water sources.
Photo: Samuel Timothée Ouedraogo / FT
FEELING HOPEFUL
H&M has achieved its clothing take-back target early, collecting 29,000 tonnes of used garments in 2019 (surpassing its target of 25,000 by 2020). In order to collect these garments, the brand has extensive communications online and in-store with incentives like money-off vouchers for each bag brought in.
So what happens to these collected used garments? In between 50–60% of the clothes are reused via resale platforms or given to charity partners for resale. The remaining garments are downcycled into insulation or recycled into new textile fibres. However, this recycling only works for 100% cotton or polyester blends and not textile blends, which is a shame considering the vast majority of garments sold each year are made from textile blends. As such, the H&M Foundation is investing in hydrothermal recycling processes for these hard-to-recycle textile blends. Considering the difficulty of recycling right now, 3% to 7% of clothing collected goes to incineration for energy recovery — none go to landfill.
Despite this scheme being very ambitious (and successful!), academic research has shown that the fashion industry needs to cut its consumption of virgin resources by 75% in 2030 to align with the Paris Agreement 1.5C trajectory… so H&M needs to innovate even more in order to meet this goal. Being such an important multinational, H&M also needs to lead by example and stop introducing new lines every two weeks and instead opt for seasonal lines. Too many clothes is just too many clothes! No matter the sustainable materials or collection systems put in place to try and negate the impacts.
Gail’s Bakery chain is striving to become a zero-waste business. So, it’s repurposing unsold bread, cheese ends, croissants and other leftovers into new products like sourdough loaves, crackers, and croutons.
The bakery started off by turning its unsold “waste bread” into new sourdough loaves, but now it has committed to developing at least 25 new products and initiatives in the next year as a part of its Waste Not range of foods. This is a really important initiative and example of leadership, considering surplus bread is a major waste problem for food retailers, especially freshly baked lines with short shelf lives. Even in our own homes, Britons throw away 24 million slices a day!!! On a little side note: instead of throwing away stale bread slices, why not use them as a “pizza” base? Also, you can buy Toast Ale beer which is made from surplus bread — read our interview with the trailblazing brewery here.
Scientists have created the world’s first ‘climate-positive’ gin. What’s their secret ingredient? Garden peas. Each bottle of Nadar gin from the Arbikie Distillery has a carbon footprint of -1.54kg of carbon dioxide — so there’s actually more carbon dioxide avoided than created. Amazing!
How does this all happen? Firstly, growing peas does not require nitrogen fertilisers, which minimises negative impacts on waterways, air, and soils. Also, peas are really beneficial for ecosystems, as they improve soil quality and help offset the need for fertilising the crops following them in crop rotations.
But that’s not it! The most interesting aspect of this gin is the fact that the waste ‘pot ale’ after the first distillation can be used as animal feed. The fact that peas have a lot of protein compared to cereals means it’s even more appropriate as an animal feed. With Europe being so highly dependent on imported soy for animal feed, which is often causing deforestation of rainforest and cerrado regions, this is a really refreshing and awesome way of remediating that. It could help Europe become more self-sufficient, less indirectly responsible for environmental damage, and better at addressing food security challenges. If you want to learn more about soy and deforestation, look back at our article on the Amazon fires.
