SQ5 : Alternative and sustainable business – EXAM WORK, doc3

SQ5 : Alternative and sustainable business – EXAM WORK, doc3

The products used again and again and again...

What businessmen and politics can do about the environment and climate change are high on the agenda at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. Prince Charles called for action : « Nature is the lifeblood^[1] of our financial markets. And as such, we must rapidly, realign our own economy to mimick nature’s economy and work in harmony with it. »

Coca Cola’s Head of Sustainability said the company believed in the circular economy and pledged to recycle as many plastic bottles as it uses by 2030. But there is a growing movement that says that recycling is not the answer to the world’s growing waste problem. This week for example, Malaysia returned 42 shipping containers of illegaly imported plastic waste back to the UK. That’s after China, once the center of the global recycling trade, shut its doors to imports of waste and recycled material two years ago. To many, it’s a sign that’s the global recycling industry is broken.

Alexandre Lemille is an expert on the circular economy, a system which wants to do away with waste altogether. He says that recycling is not an answer to waste because we are not able to separate all the waste properly. He argues that we have more and more issues controling the volume of waste, so we ship it out of our countries which creates scandals, difficult conditions for workers and health issues in other countries which are not equipped to treat our waste. (...)

He adds that we have to create a model where consumption will not lead to the creation of waste. There are many examples in the UK of « zero waste target » for cities, in private and public programmes. According to him, this is where people should head to. There should be supermarkets with products without any packaging and goods which are available as a service. Basically, people would not buy electrical devices like a washing machine anymore but the service of having their clothes washed ; they would lease the machine and send it back to the company when it breaks so that it does not go into landfill. That is the circular economy : the products gets repaired & reused, repeatedly. 

That requires of companies to think of building products that have longevity. The issue is that so much of what we use today is disposable. But Alexandre Lemille  thinks we can envisage a future economy where it is possible to repair everything. Companies only have to make that strategic decision. It is about their resilience. In fact, it is not so much about preserving the planet, it is an economic model that preserves access to resources which used to be extracted from the planet. If companies don’t take that decision to plan for the future (the possibility to have access to resources in the long-term), they might disappear from the economy.

Adapted from BBC, Business Daily, Thu 23 Jan 2020

[1] Elément moteur / vital

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