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When it comes to bioplastics, there are no excuses for unintended consequences
You know that sinking feeling that you get when you realise you should of thought of something. Well, that was me on Saturday morning staring at the front page of The Guardian and John Vidal's excellent investigation into some of the adverse environmental implications of bioplastics.
It was the first three paragraphs that did it:
"The worldwide effort by supermarkets and industry to replace conventional oil-based plastic with eco-friendly "bioplastics" made from plants is causing environmental problems and consumer confusion, according to a Guardian study.
The substitutes can increase emissions of greenhouse gases on landfill sites, some need high temperatures to decompose and others cannot be recycled in Britain.
Many of the bioplastics are also contributing to the global food crisis by taking over large areas of land previously used to grow crops for human consumption."
It's all so blindingly obvious when someone spells it out for you isn't it?
The sinking feeling, which I imagine was shared by the marketing and sustainability departments of retailers up and down the UK, was prompted by the sense that I already knew on some level that there were environmental risks attached to these "bioplastics". What Vidal had done so effectively is make those risks plain.
Anyone with even a fleeting interest in environmental science knows that organic matter will release methane as it breaks down and is probably aware that methane is one of the most harmful greenhouse gases. Just as anyone who has any experience of the UK recycling sector, knows that recycling technologies tend to lag far behind the emergence of new types of waste.
Equally, it stands to reason that if biofuels are guilty of taking up land previously used for food crops and inadvertently contributes to deforestation, then any other product that similarly diverts food away from peoples' mouths and increases pressure on agricultural land will have similar effects.
What The Guardian's investigation has done is draw together these facts, and while the bioplastics sector can justifiably claim that it poses a relatively small problem compared to the burgeoning biofuels industry and that work is underway to enhance recycling capacity, the paper is entirely right to have raised these concerns.
The investigation also serves to highlight to corporate risk assessment and due diligence teams everywhere the extent to which many of the unintended consequences that arise from well intentioned green initiatives are in fact surprisingly obvious if you just take a detached look at the bigger picture.
It is always tempting when an exciting new green technology emerges to deploy it as quickly as possible. But as the problems experienced by biofuels and now bioplastics prove, such an approach could leave you repenting at leisure. It is a fact those scientists dallying with climate modifying technologies, algae based biofuels and various other clean technologies would be advised to remember.
In the long run, bioplastics may well prove a sustainable green alternative to conventional plastics, but in the meantime firms would be well advised to make sure they have considered the full environmental impact of using these types of polymers - or else they might just have to get used to that sinking feeling each time someone else points out that their green plastics might not be so green after all.
Why McCarthy's The Road is the most important environmental business book ever written
In one of those funny coincidences that occasionally beset you I have just managed to read two consecutive novels both dealing the ever so cheery topic of the apocalypse.
The first was Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, his 1998 fantasy about a 17 year-old girl who slips into a coma in 1979 and wakes up years later to warn her friends of impending doom.
The apocalypse that follows sees the world succumb to a surreal pandemic where everyone simply falls asleep, never to wake up, until the only people left alive are the girl's boyfriend, small band of school friends, her teenage daughter who she gave birth to while in the coma, oh and the ghost of their dead classmate - bear with me here it really is a very fine read.
All the tropes familiar to anyone who has read a Coupland novel are present and correct: an appalled fascination with modernity and technology, an obsession with a group of young friends, a love of memorable one liners and a fiercely questioning agnosticism.
The apocalypse is ultimately a metaphorical one, highlighting the spiritual vacuum that afflicts the modern world - a world which the waking coma victim believes has gone dark.
However, while the end of the world may be fantastical in nature the scenes of the small group of friends coping in a city stripped of human presence offers a compelling reminder of the fragility of civilisation.
It is this concept that is taken to its chilling extreme in the second novel, Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
It tells the post apocalyptic story of a father and son travelling across a "cauterised terrain", "a cold illucid world" stripped of all life except for occasional lone travellers and terrifying bands of cannibalistic bandits.
The novel has already been hailed as a masterpiece by environmentalists, including George Monbiot who called it "the most important environmental book ever written" – he has a point.
What McCarthy's haunting, apparently post nuclear, landsape shows us is what will likely happen in the event of the biosphere collapsing. As Monbiot observes, "his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute".
So why draw your attention to all this on a business blog?
Well, besides that fact that The Road is a genuine full blown masterpiece, the kind of which you want to tell everyone about, it also highlights the full scale of the climate change risks we all face and the fragility of the societies we have built.
The world The Road imagines is necessarily extreme, but the scientific consensus is convinced that milder versions of it are heading our way unless urgent action is taken.
It always seems heartless to point out that business suffers in regions devastated by starvation, drought or flooding given that people suffer far more. But it is also a useful way for stimulating action.
The Great Depression had its roots in the dust bowl and the collapse of the midwest's ecosystem and it is a precedent all firms should take to heart. None of the many companies currently investing in India want to see their money wasted in the event of the monsoon being disrupted and the country succumbing to drought. None of the firms ploughing cash into China will want to see a vicious fight for resources between China and Russia to its north, particularly when both have the ability to turn nuclear warheads on each other – in short, if the biosphere suffers, business suffers.
Countless UN and government reports, including a new study this week from defence think tank the Royal United Services Institute, have now warned that climate change and its associated natural disasters and migrations represent the greatest security threat the world faces, but still this message is not getting through to business leaders and policy makers.
Perhaps Mccarthy's The Road can succeed where the scientists have failed and make it plain what the collapse of the biosphere really means. And if it does then the book also contains a second message for our leaders in its representation of the father and son protagonist and their compelling hope, ingenuity, and burning desire to survive.
