What we give back to earth
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Banksy
At the end of the pipeline
Part one ended with the idea that experiences may be more important than knowledge. At the same time, our negative experiences are minimized by displacing the pollution associated with our economic success. We have not solved our environmental problems but exported them to what folks in the World Bank used to call “under-polluted” countries. Our mines have moved and more wood and food now come from Farawayistan than ever before. But we are also shipping back record amounts of our waste. We dump our aging ships in India, our computers in Ghana and we even send the shit from millions of our livestock to Africa.
The odd unintended side-effect of all this is that we deny a generation the opportunity to experience the shocking and harmful cause-impact relationships of our economic success. What the rich West does is what I did as a student in my university dorm room. I swept the dirt under the carpet. If you cannot see it, it is not there. It is about time we in the West became responsible adults.
But we haven’t exported everything. Just make a “toxic tour” around Naples or go to Megali Panagia and the Skouries mine. In fact, for some pollutants my compatriots in Belgium do not need to go anywhere. Just take a deep breath on the streets of Antwerp or Brussels. Disclaimer: any harm, injury or death from doing so is not the responsibility of this author.
The trade in hot air
1997. That was the year that countries decided they could trade their air. The Kyoto agreement was where the fun began, blowing hot air into a giant balloon now worth more than €100 billion a year. The carbon part of our air that the previously discussed plantation in Uganda transformed into biomass is part of this new global industry. It was dreamed up by people like Al Gore who, at the eleventh hour, worked it into the Kyoto Agreement. The first global agreement to collectively do something on climate change needed a so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Gore argued. Without it, the US would walk. Why? Because this meant the US could carry on as normal, not curbing emissions at home. The American way of life is not up for discussion, negotiators had growled.
So here we are now. Developed countries can buy “cleaned air” from developing countries. The deal sounds reasonable enough to the economist sitting in his desk: it is cheaper to reduce emissions or turn airborne carbon into biomass carbon in countries with less expensive workforces. One of many glaring flaws though is that carbon infested air is still killing those in the West. The 10,000 Belgians who died of dirty air last year can of course no longer complain about their dirty air. Same story for the 400,000 Europeans whose deaths last year were hastened by dirty air.
But the economist will reply: well at least people in developing countries will be able to take deep breaths of cleaned air. We already know that industrial tree plantations are displacing people, something unlikely to improve their health. Another carbon credit project, this time in Mozambique, boils down to modern slavery.132 Farmers there are forced to sign a contract to maintain a tree plantation for 7 years at $63 per family, per year. For the remaining 92 years of the plantation’s productive life, they have to maintain it. For free. A pioneering form of intergenerational slavery? The company that organized this project in Mozambique, Envirotrade, was founded by a man on the run from the authorities after being convicted of training a paramilitary group. The same man had financial ties with Chile’s brutal late dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Yet this was a project heralded by the UN at the Rio+20 summit as a shining example of the fight against climate change.
So what goes on below the surface of those projects deemed unfit for the limelight? Carbon credit projects in Africa are a new form of colonial slavery, according to an international team of academics led by Professor Patrick Bond.133 These so-called climate mitigation projects are, in their opinion, just another way to grab farmlands from peasants. That is one characteristic that most major development projects have in common: they rob land and independence from the most vulnerable people. This sleight of hand has simply shifted the name and the blame from colonialism to clean development. It is their fault if they do not grab the “opportunities” we are kind enough to offer, goes the thinking. In the West we neglect that the real “they” is all too often some crackpot dictator that does not give a damn about most people he (usually it is still a he) reigns over, and with whom our companies and countries make deals that displace locals.
In October 2009, I traveled to India to visit a massive paper mill that I would have been paying money to, through the Belgian government’s plan to pay them to emit less carbon. The Indian company Yash Paper Industry claims it can help Belgium to fulfill its promises made in the Kyoto agreement. In exchange for my tax money they will reduce emissions in our place. Belgium’s climate czar admitted that his administration can’t visit the factories that deliver this great service to us but he didn’t mind if I went to do a little on-site check.
Once in their region, Yash of course opens a charm offensive. A driver picks me up at the hotel for my first meeting and before I know it, the hotel’s bill is already settled. On arrival, the firm’s financial manager, Santosh, asks if I noticed anything amiss with my hotel power supply. I sure did, it had a habit of cutting out. “Then you immediately understand why we as a paper mill never use power from the grid,” he said. Makes sense, I thought. But what didn’t make sense was that by saying that, Santosh had already shot himself in the foot. The Belgian government was stumping up cash to help Yash go off-grid. A grid dominated by coal power production. By going away from the grid, emissions would be reduced and for that service, we Belgians would pay Yash Paper. But if Yash would not touch the grid with a barge pole anyhow, what are we Belgians paying for exactly?
I was guided around the biomass boilers that power the factory. Santosh says it has always run on this kind of green electricity. That I already knew from the company’s annual reports, which include data on the levels of fossil fuel consumption. The great thing about Yash Paper is that they have always been close to zero. But then how can they get our money to reduce what they don’t burn?
The whole carbon credit system is filled to the brim with jargon crafted simply in order to mask weak arguments and obvious flaws. The good news is that you don’t need to juggle with their jargon to understand you cannot reduce production of something that you’re not making. The climate does not tolerate magic tricks. Only humans are capable of fooling themselves in such ways.
To get this trick done, you need a financial expert who can hide fraud a bit better than Santosh. But I wanted to try and play this game according to their rules. I was not satisfied with taking apart this obvious fiddle with simple logic alone. I wanted a smoking gun and one that made a mockery of their own jargon and bookkeeping magic tricks. An Indian specialist for whom the Indian bureaucracy has no secrets tracked company documents in Hindi held by numerous Indian authorities, including the Securities and Exchange Board of India. It was soon very clear that Belgian funds were never going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at Yash.
I will spare you most of the details, but one of the six magic tricks the firm had pulled stands out. The trick is called barrier inflation. Yash simply added hot air when reporting the price it paid for its boiler to a level well above the usual market price. This made it appear that Yash needed a subsidy to be able to install a green energy boiler and thus avoid the electricity from that grid (which they wouldn’t take anyway). My story, The Big Carbon Fraud, appeared in MO* Magazine in 2009 and later also in India. Shortly afterwards the opposition Green Party invited me to explain the case in detail so that they could shame the relevant minister. After all, Belgian taxpayers spend over €100 million subsidizing industrialists in exotic countries who go on to use a small fraction of that money to provide foreign journalists with a delicious curry and hotel lodgings. Thanks, taxpayers! The rest of the money finds its way into the renovation of some fancy villa or on a private jet. Taxpayers have the right to know what they are paying for, not least when it is supposed to be spent combating perhaps the most serious threat facing humanity.
The Belgian climate administration at first only said that my findings “do not exactly match their data”. But it admitted that additionality (read: authenticity or simply being real) is indeed “a very complex issue”. It also admitted it does not have the time and resources to monitor each project on location. I can understand that. The next question is: was Yash an exception? Doctor Barbara Haye of the University of California, Berkeley examined 85 similar climate projects in India and found enough smoking guns to equip a small army. More than half were not reducing greenhouse gas emissions, she showed. Lowering the burden of proof to elimination by simple logic rather than hard evidence of fraud, the rate would rise to an astounding 90 percent. In all these cases, Western countries claimed they did their part to meet their Kyoto commitments. Unsurprisingly, climate emissions have continued to rise and fast.
This is unfortunately not just an issue in India. The whole CDM is built on system errors. As with wood and palm oil, a few companies are paid by factories to do the certification. Factories pay them and they want to get the credits, so why be more strict than the two or three other certification companies? That would not make business sense. The developing countries to which the money from developed countries flows should monitor the certification companies, but what is their incentive to punish them and in doing so harm the money flow to their companies? India never disapproved a single project. Why should they? Every Euro in the coffers of Indian businesses is welcome. And for the countries that give money, they do not really mind if they get what they paid for. For them, the system is just a fast and inexpensive way to maintain the status quo at home while claiming they did their bit to tackle catastrophic climate change.
In the case of Yash, Belgium ended up withholding its funds. As a journalist, I could claim credit for that, call it a cool result of my work. But I have no illusions: Yash probably sold their hot air to a less demanding country and Belgium just switched its payment to another factory, most probably equally fraudulent. Meanwhile, nobody benefits from the more smoke-free air we are supposed to be paying for, not in India and not in Belgium. In Belgium, life expectancy has fallen by a full year due to air pollution. In Antwerp, the figure rises to 3.5 years. That also costs us billions in healthcare each year.
The need for fossil-fuel fumes free air is so acute that some documentary filmmakers hatched a creative idea to claim a slice. So they hired a truck and drove to Hungary. Belgium had paid the Hungarian government €2 million in 2011 for air that had got cleaner when its economy shrank drastically after the fall of the Soviet Union. While the European Commission dragged Belgium into court in 2011 and 2015 over its poor air quality, Belgium found money to buy pure Hungarian air from 1991, without the satisfaction of breathing it in Belgium. Of course, the Hungarians just said thanks and used it to pay for anything but efforts to combat climate change. The filmmakers came home with a truck full of Hungarian bubble plastic, dropped it at the office of our climate minister with a post-it on it, reading: “Here’s the first installment of the clean air we paid for!”
Bad as this already is, there is worse to come. In Belgium, the federal state that was planning to pay Yash actually does make an exceptional effort to prevent buying air castles. They invite NGOs to choose their criteria for granting CDM projects a subsidy and they support journalists who want to go into the field and nose around. The system failures are not the fault of the Belgian administrators, who do their best to execute political orders as best they can. But none of these extra cautions exists at the Flemish regional level. Flemish Minister of the Environment Joke Schauvlieghe proposed in 2009 to buy more of these carbon credits. Flanders purchases 20 million tonnes of clean air was the headline in all the newspapers. The minister explained that this was a great opportunity, because the market price was so low.134 Never did the journalists wonder why the price was so low.
I will tell you why the price was ridiculously low. There are factories in India and elsewhere where the production line stands perfectly still, but it still rakes in profits. They essentially threaten to make something very polluting and then accept cash not to. This state of affairs fosters a culture of sanctioned blackmail and entitlement. It converts productivity into idleness in countries that would be better off working to advance themselves. Oh and this house of cards costs all of us more than a €100 billion a year.
My former colleague Sarah Vaes once managed to get the entire fraud on the front page of a major newspaper.135 This caused insufficient electoral problems to change matters. The climatological bunkum seems too lucrative and opposing voices too weak. Almost all politicians continue to defend the status quo. Even the Greens dare not grasp the bull by the horns and are content to amend rather than replace the system, a tack they have been following for 10 years now, without any significant success. Pressure groups and concerned scientists have reached more forceful conclusions; the whole carbon trade should be recognized for what it is, a massive failure.136 This is evidenced, for example, by a petition signed by more than 140 organizations to “Scrap the ETS” – the European section of the carbon supermarket.137 Or by the success of the book The Myth of the Green Economy by researchers Anneleen Kenis and Matthias Lievens.138 So far humanity has lost 10 years and a stack of cash, and we are not even treading water. And we are still coughing our lungs out at home. As with phony ethical labels, large NGOs are afraid to shoot down the CDM and carbon trading in general. There could be several reasons for this. Maybe it would cause funding lines to dry up. Maybe they prefer to toe the line, within what is politically acceptable today. Or maybe because pulling the plug on something you have backed for years would involve eating too much humble pie. Last but not least, it could be because an unshakable faith in a free market solution to everything tends to prevail even within the environmental movement.
Sustainable destruction
In a bend of the River Schelde at Hoboken in Belgium, stands a factory that has been belching smoke since 1887. Name an element on Mendeljev’s periodic table and it is likely to have passed through this factory’s gates at some stage. Until 1960, it was heavily involved in processing raw materials from the Belgian Congo. The chimneys are now owned by Umicore, a company that turned around its colonial reputation in part after winning a prestigious award as the most sustainable company in the world in 2013. My conversation with the boss, Thomas Leysen, was on a less happy subject. I was there to present him with a long overdue invoice for €312 million.
Before I get to the invoice, there is one more thing to say about that corporate knight’s prize (named after the Canadian research institute that hands it out). The criteria for winning it include “financial health and recent payouts in court cases”. Sound odd? This sure is not the first thing that comes to mind when one thinks about the word sustainability. It is true that Umicore built the largest recycling unit for precious metals in the world in Hoboken. The company underwent a grand ecological modernization that began in the 1970s and reached a high-water mark in 2004. That year, while the Belgian Green Party was in power, Umicore shelled out €77 million to clean up the surroundings of two factories it had operated on, one in Hoboken and one in Olen. Most people in Hoboken were satisfied. “They even replaced the ground under our garden shed,” one old-timer told me.
But this is only one side of the coin. The cleaner side. The other side is one that some big NGOs do not much like to talk about. They work well with Umicore in all kinds of sustainability projects and do not want to rock the boat. I had to convince the leadership of some of Belgium’s biggest NGOs that the study I was about to unleash was worth risking their cozy relationship with a company seen in Belgium as one of the good guys.
My study confirmed that the heritage of 130 years of pollution is still very much present. The closer you go to the plant, the higher the lead, arsenic and cadmium concentrations in the soil. The company’s clean-up was limited to a much smaller perimeter than the range of pollution, and even there, only the upper soil layer had been removed. Besides that, a lot of damage had been done that remained unsettled.
In 1973, the local government sent a drastic letter to all residents of Hoboken warning them not to eat anything they might grow in their gardens. A cherished Belgian habit of growing fruit and veg was over; the soil too toxic. The move may sound over the top, but is not. There is undeniable evidence of a connection between the distance to the factory and the amount of lead in the blood of toddlers, according to the Provincial Institute of Hygiene, which has been researching it since 1978. The costs of this detection and the treatment are borne by the taxpayer, despite the fact that a private factory caused the mess. There is something called the Polluter Pays principle, which all countries signed up to back in 1992 at the first UN Rio Summit.
Umicore does not even deny they caused this increased lead in blood values or the fact that it polluted Hoboken’s gardens. But it is not ready to admit a link with cancers. I managed to obtain detailed data from the Belgian Cancer Registry and the results were shocking. Cancers are significantly more common in Hoboken than elsewhere. Lung cancer is particularly prevalent. The number of lung cancers among women in Hoboken is twice as high as the Flanders average. That could still be written off as a coincidence. Yet I was also able to surface internal Umicore documents warning about the dangers of lung cancer.
I received the document through an employee who risked losing their job by passing it to me. It literally states that lung cancer would be the most likely cancer resulting from their production process. This internal research was used to reassure the workers that the other forms of cancer they were experiencing and complaining about were not related to their work in the factory. The study was carried out by a professor paid by the company. He argued that the workers were well protected from lung cancer because they wore masks at all sensitive locations in the factory. That the same toxic substances spread out over an area where about 3000 people live was not in the scope of his study. But that does explain the massive numbers of lung cancers in the vicinity of the plant.
These connections were again confirmed through an extensive study made in the late 1990s, based on patient data from six doctors with patients in Hoboken. That study showed a clear positive correlation between the number of patients with cancer and how close they live to the plant. But the doctors from Medicine for the People did their research in their spare time, on top of their day jobs. They are not associated with a university and they are thus not connected to the peer review process. This means that Umicore found it easy to shoot down both that and my study, by saying that “popular epidemiology” and “post-normal science” are de facto worthless.
But the uncomfortable reality is that what the doctors found, what the figures of the Belgian Cancer Registry showed and what a professor paid by the company concluded all point in the same direction. In light of the levels of pollution, it is only normal to see such cancer rates. The levels mirrored other cases where toxic substances had led to a spike in cancer cases, as detailed in International Agency for Cancer Research reports from 1980, 1987, 1993 and 2006. The study I made was published in a handbook on ecological economics that is still used around the world today.139 It got the full support of Professor Joan Martinez Alier, an eminence grise in the field of ecological economics. He personally supervised the research. The association for environmental professionals in Belgium dubbed it a groundbreaking study.140 The scene was set for my meeting with the Umicore boss. The firm owed compensation to the tune of €312 million.
How did I reach this figure? We start with €12 million for the diagnosis and treatment of children in Hoboken with increased lead levels in their blood, using decades of records from the authorities who monitored this. Second, there is around €59 million that people in Hoboken have spent on vegetables and fruits that they would not have spent if they were allowed to continue using their gardens between the 1978 letter and 2008, the end of my study. Despite benchmarking these figures against as much relevant data as I could find, this amount will carry a relatively wide margin of error amounting to several million Euros. Third, treating additional cancer cases amounts to approximately €35 million, based on treatment costs recognized internationally. Finally, compensating the families of those killed by the company’s pollution would amount to €206 million, again based on recognized rates with a jurisprudence.
Walking into Umicore’s headquarters in Brussels to present it with my bombshell bill, I was flanked by a few companions: Professor Tom Bauler; Léa Sebastien, the PhD student that supported my research; and Leida Rijnhout, coordinator of the former Flemish Platform on Sustainable Development. We were meeting Thomas Leysen, Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Mr Leysen listened patiently, but made it clear that his lawyers would contest the link with cancer. But he seemed open to negotiate over the costs not related to cancer. He said he wanted to look in the mirror with a clear conscience. I believe that. We got the impression that Thomas was rather ashamed of the dirty legacy that he had inherited when he came to the helm of Umicore. He is active at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and several years later I discovered that he is active in pushing KBC in a climate-friendly direction (see part I). But he did not want to put his business at a competitive disadvantage. At the end of the day, he answers to a board of directors and shareholders, not to the thousands of people who live around his factory. That is the system error.
Thomas Leysen: “I want to create a level playing field, so that everyone has to make the same efforts in terms of sustainability.” That is indeed what should happen, but the level should be that the polluter pays, not the state or the local people.
The entire lead-in-blood story resurfaced in 2017. Blood tests of toddlers showed that lead was up to seven times over World Health organization limits. The cause was quickly identified as coming from Umicore. While replacing a roof, a lot of lead from the production process had escaped into the air over a period of 4 months. How the company failed to see this coming is beyond me. Perhaps Thomas would have been more careful in his orders if he had had to explain to the parents of Hannah and at least 14 other toddlers with increased lead levels that she was likely going to suffer from irreparable reduced concentration, headaches, inertia, anemia, movement problems and a lower IQ.141
The people in Hoboken can only hope that one day a good lawyer will take up their case. We must all hope that some enlightened policymaker creates the level playing field that Thomas Leysen talks about and that the level is where it should be. I am not a lawyer, nor a policymaker. My involvement with Umicore stopped right at the point we presented our findings to anyone who would listen. We went to talk with a group of environmental lawyers in Ghent, but the small NGO we worked for did not have the budget to pay for a legal case.
Almost no major company would make a profit if the full costs of production were paid by them.142 This is the shocking finding of a comprehensive study by the United Nations Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity program. It showed that we consumers are living in a dream world where the costs of products decline while hidden costs paid for by society go up. Costs for things like cleaning up pollution or providing healthcare. And it is precisely because of that process that conflicts to protect the common good seem to be on the rise.
Any economist will say that internalization of external costs is required. But it seems that most of them neglect that ever more costs are externalized After all, the more important question is: how do you do that? A profit-making entity is not going to do that by itself. It needs to be controlled. A strong government needs to create that level playing field so that responsible companies are not put out of business by those that continue to externalize costs. A strong government must regulate, control and police. Unfortunately, recent decades have seen the opposite trend: deregulate, privative and provide one fiscal amnesty after another.
Planned obsolescence
What companies get up to when there is little regulation and no strong government oversight goes beyond what most people think. I am not one for conspiracy theories, but some are true and the planned failure of products by their designers is one of them.
The first nylon socks were so strong that you could pull a car with them. That was a problem for manufacturers. Once everyone had two pairs of nylon socks, no more socks would be sold. And so Dupont’s product developers were instructed to make the nylon less firm so that it tore quicker. This is not a conspiracy theory, but a well-documented fact. The same forces are at work across a large part of manufacturing. The logic is pretty simple: the sooner a person bins a product, the sooner they become a customer again. And it did not take much time to catch on. As early as 1932, Bernard London wrote the paper Ending the depression through planned obsolescence. What started with nylon socks expanded to cars, textbooks, washing machines, microwaves, software, mobile phones, laptops, stereo kits, coffee machines, displays…the list goes on.
The numbers are interesting. To make a computer and monitor you need 240 kilograms of fossil fuel, 22 kilos of chemicals and 1500 liters of water.143 People may be surprised to learn that computers take a huge amount more energy to make than they will ever consume during their use. “To equal the energy used for the production of a laptop, you have to use that for more than twenty years,” according to Carsten Wachholz, a former product policy officer at the EEB. Yet computer lifespans are getting shorter. Ones made in 2010 have a 10 percent shorter lifespan than those made in the year 2000144. As a result, electronic waste has grown to more than 50 million tonnes per year.145 Consumers globally have bought more than 7 billion smartphones since 2007.146 Electronic waste represents just 2 percent of the waste in American dumps, but makes up more than 70 percent of the total amount of toxic waste.147 Approximately 80 percent is exported to Asia, where millions of people suffer from severe health damages caused by e-waste that burns and leaks into air, soil and water. Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the EU, accounting for around 10 million tonnes a year. In Flanders, the waste flow increased from 8 to 22 kilos per person in the decade from 2006.148 Growth has not been a steady linear increase, but a raging dumpster fire characterized by exponential growth. That fire is spreading to developing nations. The amount of e-waste could rise fivefold in countries like India.149
But how do you plan for obsolescence? Each self-respecting research department now has robots, according to Lode de Geyter, general director of the West Flanders University and a former electrical engineer. These robots push buttons thousands of times and test devices in a variety of ways until they find weaknesses. At this point they should be figuring out how to avoid a breakdown, but instead they calculate whether failure will likely occur before or after the warranty period is over. One trick is to set heat-sensitive components right next to internal heat sources. Hey presto, before long you have a broken product. Another trick is to hide malicious chips deep inside a printer. On some idle Tuesday morning these will switch the printer into a state of non-cooperation and their owners into a state of rage. Instead of asking to replace or clean the ink cartridge, the printer will suddenly tell us that a repair is needed.150 A true “Printer says no” moment, with no solutions offered. It is a piece of cake to then make the repair costs more expensive than buying a new one.
The problem is not the technology, but the capitalist economic system. Scheduled aging is not limited to electronics. Publishers update textbooks on subjects that have not changed, reordering the information and encouraging students to buy the shiny new version.
Thankfully, consumers have clocked what is going on and formed strategies against this buy-new culture. Student groups developed guidelines to keep track of courses using the perfectly good older textbooks. Or take Tim Hicks. Tim fixes laptops. On his website, there was a manual in PDF for each model, until Toshiba lawyers forced him to remove the manuals for more than 300 Toshiba laptops. Toshiba knows that if manuals are not online, there is no alternative for the consumer than returning the defective device to a pricey service center that will tell you “it’s going to take a few weeks and cost you a lot but we have a new version on promotion now!”
Disgusted with all this, people have built a blossoming network of fixers and repairers.151 A YouTube video shows how to get that chip deep in your printer out and the machine working again.152 There is a “repair manifesto” and a whole subculture of activists with revolutionary slogans under the credo “If you can’t fix it, you don’t own it”. People also unite in repair cafes where do-it-yourself volunteers are happy to repair your stuff for free.153 The French branch of Friends of the Earth created a website full of practical tips to make products last longer.154 German economist Stefan Schridde became famous with his website Murks, Nein Danke! He has solutions for planned aging in a broad range of products all available in seven languages.155
But we need to really pull the plug on planned failure. The leasing sector is expanding and today a company like Philips offers Lifecycle Services for lighting systems. You do not buy lamps and bulbs, you buy a fancy installation giving you sophisticated lighting where you want it. Philips installs but still owns the hardware so suddenly has an incentive to ensure its kit lasts as long as possible. For Philips, this is a profitable way to go back to the old days when they made bulbs that lasted for over 100 years. Consumers are not conned and benefit from a high-quality setup.
Most governments are only slowly waking up to the problem of predatory businesses engaging in planned aging The Austrians got ahead of the game in 2015 by launching a new label to reward durable, repair-friendly electrical and electronic equipment. France took a more forceful approach by creating rules against planned aging that could jail company executives for up to 2 years and slap on fines of up to €300,000.156 In Sweden, lawmakers halved taxes on repairs for apparel. Most governments are only slowly waking up to the problem of predatory businesses engaging in planned aging.
Broadly speaking, it is NGOs that go toe to toe against companies, as well as pressure valve resistance movements by people such as Tim Hicks, Stefan Schridde and Michel Bauwens of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. This foundation brings people together around things they make and use themselves, freed from the profit motive that steers capitalism. Wikipedia is a peer-to-peer product that has now totally eclipsed its capitalist counterpart, the Encyclopedia Britannica.
What is still missing is a stronger European and global approach. The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) has slated some good ideas, including that producers should shoulder recycling costs if their products last less than 5 years, and that the minimum lifespan of a product should be stated on its label. It also advocates for spare parts to be made available for at least 5 years even if manufacturers end the product line. Ending “industrial dictatorship” is what Jean-Pierre Haber calls his work as member and co-rapporteur of the Advisory Committee on Industrial Reconversion within the EESC. Thierry Libaert, also EESC member and rapporteur, tried a similar tack: “The Committee supports a complete ban on defective products built to shorten its lifespan.” But the EESC is merely an advisory body. Groups such as the European Consumer Protection organization (BEUC) do their best, but they enjoy no formal power. Meanwhile, the rise of populist Eurosceptic voices makes bigwig political leaders in Brussels look for ways to sideline eco-design regulations instead of strengthen them. The prevailing mood is that regulation is bad, no matter what it actually does.
Circular economy?
In 2014 I joined the EEB, the largest federation of environmental NGOs in Europe. My new colleagues were delighted with a package of product and waste measures that the European Commission had published. We were going to be moving towards a “circular economy”. Among all the cheers it sometimes seemed like extraction and waste would soon become a thing of the past and that all the problems described in this book would cease to exist.
A little later, I was in Copenhagen listening to Professor Joan Martinez Alier explaining to experts from the European Environmental Agency that the industrial economy is not circular “and can never be circular”. What was going on here?
Joan used the second law of thermodynamics to explain that you can use the energy in fossil fuels only once and that the whole economy, including the circular economy, depends on those fossil fuels. Today we use around 15 billion liters of oil. Every. Single. Day.
Who was right, my new colleagues or the professor I was working for? The answer depends on whether you see the EU package as a glass half empty or half full. On the upside, the package would generate 415 megatons of CO2 savings and 870,000 additional jobs. But if, say, Umicore uses more fossil fuels to burn broken mobile phones to extract a few grams of gold from them, is that progress? Can the circular economy mean two things at once: a step forward in reducing extraction and creating jobs, but a step back in using even more fossil fuels? Whether the buzzword “circular economy” helps us forward or backwards depends entirely on the extent to which its implementation is holistic. Is it just about material flows or does it also include the energy factor? And what about the facts on resource extraction?
All of a sudden, the question of who was right became academic. Despite years of work and all the benefits that the package offered, a newly appointed European Commission under Jean-Claude Juncker decided in autumn 2014 to bin the lot. Juncker’s team had a simple sheepish mantra: less rules good, more rules bad. And just like Orwell’s sheep in Animal Farm that slogan applied to everything and everyone and is being repeated over and over again.
Professor and engineer Willi Haas and his team wondered how circular the global and European economy already are. Every year, about 4 gigaton of materials are recycled, while 62 gigaton of new material enters the economy, the scientists estimated. The world economy was thus about 7 percent circular.157 The other 93 percent saw the digging up, cutting down and hauling about of finite raw materials.
For me, that study was an eye opener. It showed how far away we are from a true circle. The economy is still basically a massive pipeline with very small loops here and there. Haas and colleagues also calculated that about 44 percent of everything that is dug up is eventually burned and thus no longer available for circularity. Willi and company basically concluded that our economy is a pipeline so thick that you cannot bend it into a circle. Strategies that focus at the end of the pipeline cannot work because there is just too much flow. They advocate a switch to renewable energy, more drastic eco-design and a significant reduction in the amount of stuff we put into the gaping mouth of the pipe that we call “the economy”. They argue there is no way around the need to dig up a factor less than we do now. This means economic degrowth. And sadly this is currently the stuff of political science fiction. The word degrowth itself is even taboo. Meanwhile, the global economy went from 62 to 78 Gigaton between 2005 and 2010. These levels put the idea of making the economy circular in the realm of fiction.
The gap between political and scientific realities is big and getting bigger. Take the Oxford scientists who at the start of 2017 argued that climate change is but one of many threats facing humanity and that the interconnection or interference of different trends of environmental breakdown is still underestimated.158 In mathematics, one plus one equals two. But when two storms suddenly join forces, the net effect can be a whole lot bigger than the sum of its parts. The scientific team, which includes five top scientists from several national academies of science, points the finger of blame at the combination of growth in the use of raw materials and land, but also at forms of pollution other than atmospheric. In scientific language, they say that the conditions for maintaining human societies at their present scale are being undermined. In common parlance, they are saying we are fucked if we continue like this.
Meanwhile, we keep doing the opposite of what scientists say we have to do. Consumption of materials increases by 3.6 per cent per year on average.159 The world population is increasing by 1 per cent per year, although that growth is slowing. The UN forecasts that the global population will grow by 20 percent by 2050, but consumption will grow by 200 percent. The key issue is clearly our overconsumption, not overpopulation.
Earth can sustain 10 billion people for a very long time to come. But not 10 billion Western-style consumers. That is why a real circular economy has to be part of our solution, while realizing it is not a silver bullet. It needs to come together with a plan for degrowth. Fortunately, Jean-Claude Juncker’s deputy, Frans Timmermans, went to the trash bin to dig out the circular economy package his boss had binned in order to try and recycle it. The new version is not as good as the old, but my colleagues are working night and day to make it more ambitious. My job is to argue that you also need to keep resources in the ground in much more radical ways. Here’s why: 71 percent of all resources circulating in our economy are not even recyclable – such as fossil fuels. To tackle that, you need much more recycling as much as you can the 29 percent that is up for recycling.
Toxic tour in mafia territory
Despite being experts in exporting our shit, so to speak, we have kept some of it in Europe. We can “thank” the Naples mafia for that. As part of my work, I did a toxic tour of their playground: the Campania region around Naples.“If anyone comes, hide your cameras,” warns the Italian activist as he leads us beyond a no-entry sign of a landfill in the region. “Cinque minuti”, he adds as we get out of the minibus – we do not have long. We jump out and start shooting pictures like a busload of eager Japanese tourists. I zoom my camera in on a leaking battery then out to snap the mountains of waste. These mountains are made up of waste balls; a mix of toxic crap compressed into a ball a few meters in diameter. The consortium of companies who made them call them ecoballs. They either have a sense of humor or they are referring to the economic benefits. Either way, there’s nothing ecological about these balls. Inside, they will stuff anything, from plastic bags to asbestos plates.
After a few more pictures, the leading local activist calls us back to the minibus. In the distance, a truck approaches. We are just outside the gate as it rumbles past. From its livery, it is supposedly transporting beer. But the activist tells us that he’s simply delivering a fresh batch of ecoballs. Activists have mapped some 5200 illegal landfill sites in Campania by 2010. Campania is the forgotten sinkhole of Europe. Waste crime is one of the fastest growing forms of organized crime. Our skyrocketing e-waste problem is also fueling this dark economy, but you’ll find all kinds of waste here.
Lucie Greyl has been studying the waste problem in Campania for years and she says that illegal managing is cheaper, so more convenient. Illegal trafficking of waste in Italy was earning the mafia somewhere around €7 billion in 2008, according to the Italian environmental organization Legambiente.160 Like a leaking barrel, their profits had expanded to around €19 billion by 2015.161 The authorities have been trying to grapple with this waste mafia empire, making 1602 arrests that year and dragging 871 companies into court.162 It has had little effect. Italy holds the European record for “lost waste”. Touring Campania, it is not hard to find it. The fallout is also pretty easy to trace. Residents here are four times more likely to get cancer than their compatriots.163
Another consequence is perverse: a circular economy for poison. We export it to Italy, the mafia sells it as compost and Italian farmers export their mozzarella and tomatoes back to us. Sounds unbelievable, but one researcher discovered that even nuclear waste from German power plants was being used as compost in Italy. Activists and journalists who uncover such stories risk their lives.
In 2018, I checked back on the fate of the ecoballs we photographed in 2009. “Well, they’re still there”, says Lucie Greyl. “At one point the regional waste plan planned to ‘treat’ and then burn part of them, but that was never implemented.”
Despite the mafia’s best efforts, the area around Naples is a Garden of Eden compared to Agbogbloshie in Ghana, the world’s biggest e-waste dump. This hellish landscape comes complete with infernos of burning wires and circuit boards. The smoldering is actually smelting, fires tended by thousands of kids working to recover valuable metals. Many die from cancer before they are 30.
In Europe, only half of all e-waste is recycled. The rest is shipped mainly to landfills like this in West Africa and Asia. It is shipped there in disguised and illegal ways, because in theory the export of e-waste is prohibited by European law. But not every member state wants to tackle the problem themselves. A new law obliges these governments to make and publish accurate inspection plans. But free movement arrangements mean there is little to stop companies exporting their e-waste from the porous ports of Southern Italy.
Shipping hazardous waste outside the EU is a routine job for many companies. Only occasionally do things turn sour. Dutch company Trafigura delivered a gift to Cote d’Ivoire in August 2006: 20 containers of a super toxic substance. They had first tried to unload their toxic waste in Amsterdam but the smell was so foul that Amsterdam’s environmental authorities forced them to stop and reload it. Then they went to Cote d’Ivoire, where through some shady dealings this stuff ended up contaminating the sidewalks of the poorer suburbs of the capital. The smell was so toxic that the Ivory Coast Anti-pollution Center later said it “may cause immediate death in the event of inhalation”. But it took a while before the flooded hospitals knew what it was they were treating. The waste did kill at least 15 people and injured at least 30,000. The scandal forced Prime Minister Konan Banny to dissolve his entire cabinet.
So what just happened? Trafigura had calculated that it was cheaper to deliver deadly waste to some Cote d’Ivoire subcontractor who went on to do the actual dumping for them than to the port authorities in Europe, where it would have cost €1000 per cubic meter to properly process it. But in doing so, Trafigura broke the law and for once, it paid a reasonable price for its cold-blooded business model. It was forced to cough up $200 million in compensation to the Ivorian government followed by an undisclosed sum to the 30,000 Ivorians. But executives were never prosecuted by the competent authorities. No CEO had to contemplate jail time for unleashing chemical hell on tens of thousands.
The UN used the tenth anniversary of the incident to ask for renewed global attention to the violation of human rights it caused.164 Thousands of victims still received nothing and much of the waste was never treated and is still hurting people in Ivory Coast. Just a month after this “anniversary”, the name of Trafigura reappears, connected this time with illegal shipping to West Africa of diesel a hundred times dirtier than that permitted under European standards.165
Beaching boats in Bengal
There are other ways to get rid of European waste without the need of hiring a dodgy Ivorian subcontractor. Many companies simply load a rusting hulk up with toxic waste and run it aground on some forgotten stretch of Bangladeshi coastline. Once the captain sights the exotic beach of Alang, he just needs to look for a gap between all the other wrecks, line his hulk up and steam full ahead up the beach. He dumps his dirty load, flies home without having to think much about death. But death there is.
Over the last 23 years there have been 485 deaths in India, 460 in Bangladesh and 345 in Pakistan, according to Shipbreaking Platform, an NGO. These figures exclude all workers who died from illness from the hazardous cargoes abandoned in ships. It includes only the big reported accidents, such as when an oil tanker exploded on a beach in Pakistan on November 1, 2016, killing 77.
Deaths are inevitable when you cut oil tankers to pieces with hobby tools. On a beach, it is impossible to work with large machines and cranes. So in Bangladesh they send an army of workers, among whom disadvantaged children, into the ships armed with iron saws and hammers. The reason why the ships are broken down to pieces is that money can be made from recycling the steel. A large container ship fetches up to €10 million in India. And for steel there is no such thing as a consumer label. Nowadays, a chocolate brand has to think twice before going to market without some fair or green (washed) label on it. But even upstanding, clean consumer types like me do not care where the steel in their bike comes from. It goes to show that there are limits to the idea of making consumers more conscious about the products they buy. I too get tired of checking everything. In most cases, it is just a whole lot more efficient and effective when states make arrangements to block dodgy products from the market in the first place.
Almost 40 percent of all ships in the world visit the EU, but only 1 percent are scrapped there. More than half of all major ocean ships in the world end up beached in Pakistan, India or Bangladesh. The EU estimates that each year, more than a million tonnes of toxic waste travels with those ships from the EU to South Asia. That includes 3000 tonnes of asbestos. In many yards, workers just burn it on the beach.
Europe has a couple of decent decommissioning yards. But the owners of knackered ships get far less if they retire them there. In Europe you get around $150 per tonne of steel, compared to $300 in China and $500 in India. Despite this, more and more Scandinavian companies are opting for the less lucrative but more sustainable option, under pressure from activists and journalists doing some decent reporting on the conditions at shipyards in South Asia. In addition to moral, ecological or social motives, there are also economic motives to dismantle ships closer to home.
At Europe’s largest ship-recycling site in Ghent, around 35,000 tonnes of steel is recycled each year. You would expect the Belgian government to support European regulations prohibiting the dumping of ships on Indian beaches, in order to boost jobs at home. But Belgium actually favors weak regulation on the beaching of ships.
Perhaps that has something to do with some of Belgium’s great and good. Take the Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), whose largest base is the port of Antwerp, Belgium. The company is based in Switzerland, a pioneer in secret bank accounts and amoral flows of cash. MSC is the world record holder in dumping toxic ships in developing countries; 55 to date. A fire on one of them in 2009 killed six.
The company came under fire from pressure group Greenpeace 10 years ago. A Swiss TV documentary in 2012 confirmed that MSC was still playing dirty by sending ships containing asbestos and other hazardous materials to India. According to the University of St Gallen, it continues to violate numerous international conventions.166 Yet MSC has been trying to cultivate an environmentally friendly image.
Attempts to try and force companies like MSC to get shipshape have been fruitless. The catchily named “International Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal” as well as the European Waste Shipment Regulation were quite literally circumvented. Shipping companies sold their ships as soon as they were outside European waters. The EU then banned ship dumping in India with its EU Regulation on Ship Recycling. But the back door has remained open since the rules only apply to ships that sail under the flag of a European nation. More than 90 percent of MSC ships are flagged to Panama, a modern-day pirate flag that quickly tells you that this ship is fishy. Panama’s shipping regulations come with minimal taxes, environmental and working conditions. Having a Panama flag, or one for Liberia or the Marshall Islands, is the same as signaling ownership of a shadowy Swiss or offshore bank account. Today, 40 percent of all goods transported by ship are stowed aboard a vessel with one of these flags-of-convenience.
Tracking this cozy little scandal has for many years fallen to a little organization called the Shipbreaking Platform. Led by Patrizia Heidegger, a tireless woman working in an attic room just above my former office, the NGO has occupied an equally obscure corner of the environmental movement. It should not be this way. After all, shipping is to the industrialized economy what blood is to the body: it transports a huge proportion of the goods we all use every day. Both systems are vulnerable and choking a main artery can have major consequences.
Patrizia:
The shipping industry is regulated by the UN International Maritime Organization (IMO), but not well. New conventions always reflect the extremely low standards that Panama, Liberia and Marshall Islands want, whose combined fleet is so large that no convention reaches quorum without them. The IMO may be the only UN institution that regulates a single industrial sector, but in practice, industry is regulating itself.
In fact, the US is puppet master, controlling how these three weak states act. The US has historic and contemporary ties to all three of them that puts it in a position of very strong influence.
The IMO could become a powerful control body. In rare cases, it already is. Following a series of oil tanker disasters, it mandated structural improvements to this type of vessel. Even then, it was the EU that got the ball rolling after the Erika disaster in 1999 and it was the US that was impatient to ban the less robust type of tanker. The IMO had no choice but to take action. Enforcement was simple. Check compliance at port and if they were not ship shape, they were not coming in or out.
There is no way beaching can be done safely. According to the International Labour Organization, breaking up ships is the most dangerous occupation in the world, mainly due to the many deaths on beaches in South Asia. Aside from the many accidents, workers there are occasionally also confronted by the police, who have fired their guns on them when a rare demonstration ran out of control.
Bann ing beaching would be a great step forward and the good news is that in a technical sense, the solution is at hand. “You only need two things,” Patrizia explained.
First, a set of technical standards for how to dismantle a ship. The EU actually does this with the Ship Recycling Regulation, which bans breaking up vessels on beaches, imposes strict rules on labor rights and on hazardous waste management. But secondly, you need a license that obliges shipowners to deposit a certain amount on a blocked bank account every year, funds set aside for the vessel’s eventual retirement. Each subsequent owner pays the same sum into the same blocked account and the last owner gets that money only if the ship goes to a proper decommissioning site, one that meets safety and environmental standards. If port authorities control compliance, this system could be in place and working as quickly as the tanker rules. To achieve all this, there just has to be political will.
In some places, the political will is growing. The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund (i.e. Norwegian Central Bank – Government Pension Fund Global) decided to exclude companies that send their ships to be broken on tidal flats from their portfolio. With so many banks following the decisions taken by the Norwegians, that sets an important precedent.
In the shipping industry there’s little will to change course. Cronyism reigns supreme. The shipping industry has pretty long tentacles. Take the Compagnie Maritime Belge (CMB). Like Umicore, the company got rich on the back of a genocide in Congo. King Leopold, who decimated the population of Congo from around 20 to 8 million during his brutal reign, was the one who deployed the then Compagnie Belge Maritime du Congo to ship the loot back to Belgium. As owners of CMB, the Saverys family inherited the massive wealth made on the back of this massive plundering and man slaughtering. As billionaires they are one of the wealthiest families in Belgium.
The Saverys’s tentacles reach to De Tijd (the Belgian equivalent of the Financial Times) and the influential think tank Itinera, to name just a few branches of their business empire. So it is not in De Tijd that you will read how CMS’s ship, the Mineral Water, switched ownerships and flags using a mailbox company in the British Virgin Islands (owned by shady Indian diamond tycoons, as shown in the Panama Papers) and the Polynesian Island of Niue to become the property of the company Kabir Steel in Bangladesh.167 Before applying for a job at CMB I recommend reading 1984 by George Orwell. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. A toxic tanker is Mineral Water.
An investigation into possible criminal offenses committed by CMB in relation to “The Mineral Water” was opened. The CEO of CMB should start worrying when reading about the case of Seatrade in nearby Rotterdam. On March 15, 2018, the Rotterdam District Court sentenced, on the basis of the EU Waste Shipment Regulation, shipping company Seatrade for the illegal export of vessels sent for scrapping on the beaches of South Asia. The heavy fine and 1-year ban to execute a job in the sector was the first time that a European shipping company had been held criminally liable for having sold vessels for scrap to substandard shipbreaking yards in India and Bangladesh. More worrying for the CEO might be that the Prosecutor’s request that the Seatrade executives face prison was only waived in light of this being the first time such criminal charges had been pressed. This groundbreaking judgment sets a European-wide precedent for holding ship owners accountable for knowingly selling vessels, via shady cash-buyers, for dirty and dangerous breaking in order to maximize profits.
Belgians are recycling champions. But the Flemish go a step further, recycling more than 65 percent of household waste. We are the global recycling elite. Many of us actually enjoy it, making a sport of how long we can do before putting a mixed waste bag on the sideway and for those that do not, there are strict rules to ensure we do our duty. Meanwhile, the European Commission says that a quarter of all waste exports from European ports to Africa and Asia are illegal exports. A large chunk of that leaves from Antwerp, Flanders’ gateway to the world. Until Belgium manages to issue the first ever criminal penalty for dirty, dangerous and illegal dumping of ships, it seems harder to throw a beer can in the wrong place than to dump an oil tanker on a Bengal beach.
How we give back to earth
In this second part of the book, our journey shifted to the end of our pipeline economy. We learned that we are fooling ourselves by trading hot air, creating poisonous circles and trying to bend a thick pipeline into a circle. This can only end in tears, scientists say, unless we drastically change course. Products with planned aging should simply be banned from the market. Illegal toxic waste streams to exotic locations should be a ticket to jail rather than riches. Laws to prevent all this should not be as leaky as Fukushima’s nuclear power plant. It is foolish to wait for philanthropic business executives to improve our lot. The State will somehow have to save Mother Earth and I am afraid this will require some old-school legal punishments for those who are busy raping her.
If you look at the global economy from a human perspective, a perspective that envisages a thriving civilization at the end of this century, how might today’s obese pipeline be transformed? Just try to imagine that for one reason or another, on some blue Monday morning, the most polluting half of all ships representing half of all world trade on earth are suddenly stuck in harbor. Imagine that large groups of citizens, supported by scientists, shift their focus from the start or the end of the global pipeline and instead point their arrows to the few choke points in between them? Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link and in the case of the global economy, the choke points are certain sea lanes and a limited number of major harbors. If the world economy is an hourglass, harbors are the narrow middle separating extraction sites at one end from shopping malls at the other.
In 2016, some 4000 people stopped a major coal mine in Germany from working for a full 2 days. How many people are needed to block major ports? It took just 500 to block the biggest coal depot of Antwerp harbor for a full day, back in 2009. At the time it was the biggest action of the climate action camp in Belgium, in collaboration with groups from the Netherlands.
We also need networks to inspire conscious consumption, low impact idols on TV and more community supported farmers like Tom. They show us how to consume differently and provide solutions to disconnect us from the global pipeline that seems bound to blow sooner or later. But they alone are just not enough. As long as they merely chip away at the problem while the global pipeline remains vast and gaping, we are still on course for a disaster, all of us.
In the global struggle to reduce the volume of mining, consumption and waste, we will need to think strategically. Geography matters in every conflict and this global conflict is no exception. While exploitation and consumption occur almost everywhere, 90 percent of world trade depends on a limited number of ships, ports and routes. Most often, these choke points are located where a lot of people live. People that could be moved into direct action. We already have some experience in blocking boats, for example through Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd. Robin Hood style pirates could also disrupt shipping lanes in Europe with just a limited number of well-trained activists backed up by a landlubber legal team. Small but motivated groups of canoeists could form a series of clots in the world’s veins and seriously constrict the flow. Precedents have been set from the US to Australia, sometimes with just two people blocking a coal port for a whole day.
Now imagine that you also have the unions on your side. They will need assurances over their jobs and that is why a detailed alternative employment plan should be worked out. Putting a brake on the excesses of global trade could actually stimulate untapped potential in regional trade and thus create more jobs, for example in the inland shipping sector. About 15 years ago I had a professor in urban planning called George Allaert. I recall how he thundered about the scandalous under-utilization of all the inland waterways from Paris to north of the Netherlands and into Germany. He stormed out of meetings because officials refused to fully harness the network that already exists. Inland shipping in Belgium only started improving in 2016 after a mileage tax was slapped for all cargo traffic by truck.168 But the margin for growth remains enormous, according to experts such as Allaert.
If the above idea sounds outlandish, that may be in part due to a truly fundamental belief that all international trade is good by nature, regardless of what it means for nature. And that brings me to the third part of this book, where I will talk about the myths that are so pervasive that ideas like blocking ports hardly come up even in the minds of many environmentalists. These myths make the idea of slowing down global trade look stupid, terrifying or worse. I am going to talk about the basic assumptions that determine almost all our policies today and that together form the dominant world view or ideology of our times. In my humble opinion, this world view is operating in contradiction to physical reality, as described in parts 1 and 2. I am going to talk about world trade, major agreements to boost it, its ideological underpinnings and finally, the greatest myth of all, the perceived necessity for perpetual economic expansion in the form of GDP growth. What follows are the myths of this age.