Episode 56 - Ethical Coffee

What is Coffee?

Coffee beans are the inner seed from the “cherry” of the coffea plant, which is native to Ethiopia.[1] Coffee is the world’s second most tradable commodity, after crude oil. There are four primary types of coffee: Arabica (coffea arabica), Robusta (coffea caniphora), Liberica (coffea liberica), and Exelsa (coffea liberica var. dewervrei).

Arabica is the most common type of coffee consumed in North America. Arabica beans are sweet less acidic in flavour than Robusta beans. They are farmed in areas with high elevations above sea level and where rain is prevalent. Arabica plants are delicate and prone to disease, which makes it challenging to grow in large quantities.

Robusta beans are most popular in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. It is not generally very popular because it can taste burnt or rubbery. But Robusta coffee is easier to grow and has higher levels of caffeine (which acts as a natural insect repellant). It is typically used in instant coffee and as a filler in dark roasts. There are some very good Robusta coffees, but this variety is usually seen as lower quality.

Liberica and Excelsa are both relatively rare coffee beans.

You can grow a coffee plant in your apartment, but don’t expect it to produce coffee cherries. Coffee plants are trees that yield mature harvests only after 4-7 years of attentive cultivation.[2]

There are lots of different coffee brewing styles (e.g., drip, pour over, cold brew, espresso, ristretto). Capsule coffee is a rising trend. More than 40% of U.S. households own an espresso pod machine. The global market for coffee pod and capsule machines is expected to double by 2025. 

There is also a wide variety of coffee drink types (e.g., espresso, americano, cappuccino, flat white, affogato, iced coffee) but we won’t get into those.

How Coffee is Made

When coffee cherries are picked, the beans are removed either through a “dry” or “wet” process. The dry process involves leaving the beans in the sun to dry and then running them through a grinder. In the wet process, you use water to wash the fruit away from the seed. The “green” coffee beans are then “cleaned” (inspected and sorted) and then roasted.

A (Brief) History of Coffee

Four hundred years ago, coffee was a “mysterious Ottoman custom” cultivated commercially only in Yemen.[3] Now it is an “unrivalled work drug” and a ubiquitous daily necessity.[4] It is also a cash crop produced by more than 25 million people in over 70 countries.[5]

The word coffee derives from the Arabic “qahwah”, meaning wine: coffee is the wine of Islam.[6] Early coffee cultivation took place in the sixteenth century on the hillsides of Yemen.[7] The Ottoman empire set up a coffeehouse as one of its first actions after conquering a new city, to demonstrate the civility of their rule.[8]

Coffee became a European luxury in the seventeenth century as Europeans brought the tradition back from visits in the Middle East. Coffee was especially popular in England. The first coffeehouse in London was established in the early 1650s, but by the turn of the 18th century there were several hundred coffeehouses there.[9]

British traders had more success trading for tea than coffee, which is one reason that England is today associated more with tea than coffee.[10]

Arab traders in Yemen monopolized coffee production until 1699, when the Dutch successfully introduced coffee to Java.[11]After that, coffee spread around the world through pathways of empire and slavery.[12] After the Dutch, the French colonial administrators took coffee to Africa. Then the Dutch introduced coffee to Suriname. Then a Portuguese official smuggled coffee from French Guiana to Brazil. The British began cultivating coffee in Jamaica and the Spanish established coffee in Cuba. By the end of the 18th century coffee was virtually everywhere in the Americas.[13]

The Coffee Industry

The total value of the global coffee industry was $465.9 billion in 2020 (this was a huge jump from 2019). 10.21 million bags of coffee were exported in 2020.

People around the world drink coffee, but the Aussies may be the most committed market. Even though the U.S. population is 12x the Australian population, the Australian coffee market ($7.8 billion) is more than half as much as the U.S. coffee market ($14 billion).

The world’s top coffee exporters include: Brazil, Vietnam, Colombia, Honduras, and Indonesia. Canada’s top coffee supplying countries are Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico.

Around 125 million people globally depend on coffee for their livelihoods. Unlike some commodities, which are grown on large plantations, small coffee farms proliferate: smallholder farmers produce 80% of the world’s coffee.

Like other agricultural commodities, farmworkers receive very little of the value added from coffee. Coffee farmers typically earn only 7-10% of the retail price of coffee. The rest goes to traders, roasters, and retailers downstream.

In part, this has to do with the concentration of coffee buying and processing. Three coffee buyers control half of the global coffee trade (ECOM, Neumann and Volcafe). And 40% of coffee is processed by the ten largest coffee roasters, including Nestlé and Jacobs Douwe Egbers (JDE).

There is an interest in making the coffee industry fairer. Consumer research has found that 53% of U.S. coffee drinkers want to buy ethical coffee and are willing to pay $1.31 extra for a cup of coffee produced by a cooperative farmer.

Working Conditions

A Living Wage for Coffee Farmers

The low, and volatile, price of coffee is one of the biggest problems for coffee producers. Nearly 61% of coffee growers are selling their coffee at prices under the cost of production. While the global coffee industry has been growing, coffee farmers’ average incomes have not changed in the past 20 years, and has actually decreased when you factor in rising farming costs.

The low price of coffee is also a cause of child labour. Remember that coffee is farmed primarily by smallholders. Farmers will often pull their children from school into labour on coffee plantations, in order to produce enough to make a living.

Fairtrade Coffee

Fair trade is one solution to the problem of low coffee prices. Coffee is by far the leading fair trade product.[14] 

To provide farmers with a living income, fair trade estimates that coffee would need to be sold at $1.40 per pound. That is 40% higher than the current market price for coffee. And arguably even that price is not high enough. That is why the Fairtrade Minimum Price for coffee is $1.40 per pound (or $1.70 for organic).

On top of that, farmers receive a $0.20 per pound Fairtrade Premium, of which at least 25% is invested in productivity and quality initiatives. Co-operatives invest the rest in projects that they choose, which can be facility upgrades or things like community healthcare. Fairtrade coffee producers earned more than $94 million in Premium in 2017.

Forced Labour

Forced labour is a problem on some coffee plantations. For example, a 2019 investigation by Thompson-Reuters Foundation found evidence of widespread use of modern slavery on Brazilian coffee plantations.  

Environment

A 2008 study by Ben Salinas found that brewing and transportation are the two biggest sources of emissions from coffee production. The study shows that coffee growing and roasting both have a relatively small environmental footprint.

Coffee Growing

Sun Grown versus Shade Grown Coffee

Coffee has traditionally been grown under a shaded canopy of trees (shade grown), but recently there has been a shift to sun-grown coffee to meet greater demand. Sun-grown coffee is worse for the environment for two main reasons: it requires fertilizer and it is a cause of deforestation since forested area is cleared to make space for the plantations.

Coffee from Colombia, Brazil, and Costa Rica is usually grown on full-sun plantations. Whereas Peru, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Ethiopia usually produce shade-grown coffee.

Most, though not all, organic growers will use shade-grown methods. To be extra sure that your coffee is shade-grown, you can also look for Bird-friendly Certification. 

Water Use 

Approximately 130 litres of water are needed to produce one cup of coffee. For context, a kilogram of beef takes 15,400 litres of water. And a cup of dairy milk takes 255 litres to produce.

Most of the water used to produce coffee is used in the growing process.

Impact of Climate Change

Climate change is impacting coffee yields as pests infest crops. It is also changing the ideal altitude for coffee growing. For example, Fairtrade International has said that warmer temperatures could push Arabica coffee production higher up into mountains and forest reserves, potentially displacing communities and wildlife.

Brewing Method

There are debates about the best and worst ways to brew coffee, but a lot depends on the volume of coffee that you are making and how you are using the system. One thing we can say fairly definitively is that cold brew is the most environmentally friendly way to brew coffee, since it requires no electricity, provided that you use a reusable filter. Generally speaking, a brewing method will be more environmentally friendly if you have a reusable filter, waste very little product, and keep the machine on for a short duration.

There are some articles out there saying that coffee pods are good for the environment. I take issue with these articles.

So, what is true about them? The life cycle assessments have pointed to something that is generally right: single-serve systems tend to result in less coffee waste, and that be more sustainable.

Drip coffee has generally been found to have a larger environmental impact than single-serve coffee, because LCAs assume that people prepare too much coffee at one time and brew extra batches to retain freshness. However, wasted product is something the consumer can control.

And that can make a big difference for thre outcome of these assessments. For instance, a 2015 study finds that accurate amounts of drip-brewed coffee outperformed single-serve methods, while over-preparation and keeping the warming plate on meant the highest environmental impact. (This study also assumed that drip coffee was brewed using a disposable paper filter and conventionally packaged coffee, but that is not necessarily what people are using.)

Even if you waste less coffee using a capsule system, that still does not mean that single use-coffee pods are good for the environment. It means we need to be careful about over-producing coffee and keeping warming pots on. These analyses typically do not measure against single-serve measures like French press, which eliminate the waste problem while also avoiding the garbage problem of coffee pods.

Every minute approximately 29,000 coffee capsules are dumped into landfills worldwide. The pollution problem associated with single-use capsules is huge, and it is undercounted in these lifecycle analyses. That is because these studies build in rosy assumptions about coffee pods. Sure, single-use capsules might not be a problem big deal if you assume that coffee pods are always put in the recycling—which they aren’t—and actually recycled—which, again, they aren’t.

There is a debate about the relative merits of different capsules. In one study, biodegradable capsules perform the best. In another, aluminum pods are viewed as the best choice. But these studies assume that capsules are ending up where they need to – either being composted or recycled appropriately, and we know that that is rarely the case.

So, if you are going to stick with a coffee pod machine, the best solution is to go for reusable pods. We think that’s a great choice! Here is a guide to help you choose the right reusable capsules.

It might be more efficient to get coffee at a café, since they produce a high volume of coffee. But there are a lot of factors that would go into it, and we couldn’t find a study on this question.

Packaging

Most coffee packaging is not recyclable because of the coffee bag laminate. Some roasters will sell coffee by weight in a container of your choosing. Or you can try your local bulk foods store.

Accompaniments

How do you take your coffee? One great way to reduce the environmental impact of coffee consumption is to switch from animal milk to a plant milk (for more on that see our alternative milks episode). If you add sugar or a powdered creamer, consider the impact of these accompaniments as well.

What You Can Do

Buy Ethical Coffee

World Vision recommends looking for coffee that is Fairtrade International, Fair Trade Certified, UTZ Certified, or Rainforest Alliance Certified. Try doubling up with organic certification, to ensure that your coffee is shade-grown. You can also buy from local roasters that are committed to buying ethical coffee. These roasters may prefer a direct purchasing strategy instead of going with a certification program. That can be a good approach, if you trust that the roaster takes ethics seriously.

Brew Efficiently

Whatever brewing method you use, make it as efficient as possible by:

●      Avoiding single-use filters

●      Turning the machine off when you’re done

●      Not producing more than you need

●      Keeping the machine clean, so it operates efficiently

Support Responsible Supply Chain Legislation

Support legislation that would require big companies to take action and report on their efforts to address child labour, modern slavery, and other human rights violations in their supply chains.

Canada started consultations in 2019. Bill S-216, An Act to Enact the Modern Slavery Act, would require large businesses listed on the Canadian stock exchange, or having a connection to Canada, to provide an annual report which would be posted publicly on the company’s website, as well as in a public government database. The Bill would also ban the import of goods produced by forced or child labour.

The Bill is currently in committee in the Senate (since 30 March 2021), having passed the second reading. That means that now is a good time to contact your Senators and Member of Parliament to ask if they support Bill S-216 and let them know that the Bill has your support.

Australia, the United Kingdom, California, and France already have similar laws (although in France the approach is a bit different). However, the Canadian legislation potentially goes further by amending the customs tariff to wholly exclude goods from entering Canada if manufactured by forced or child labour.

Endnotes

[1] Sedgewick. Augustine. (2020). Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favourite Drug. New York: Penguin Randomhouse LLC.

[2] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[3] Sedgewick, Coffeeland p.11

[4] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[5] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[6] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[7] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[8] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[9] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[10] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[11] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[12] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[13] Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

[14]Sedgewick, Coffeeland.

Episode 53 - Flowers

The Flower Industry

Four different types of products are sold in the flower industry: cut flowers, foliage, plants, and young plant material. This episode focuses on cut flowers.

The Demand for Cut Flowers

The cut flower industry is worth $100 billion worldwide. 60% of flowers are bought as a gift and another 20% are for weddings or funerals. Flowers Canada did a Consumer Research Study, which found that the two gifts millennial women most appreciate are wine and flowers.

How It Works

Flowers are grown, cut and packed on flower farms. Then they either go to a flower auction or through the direct flower trade. Florists buy flowers either through auctions or directly to wholesalers.

This short video shows what Dutch flower auction houses look like. 40% of the world’s imported flowers pass through auction houses in the Netherlands.[1] Fun fact: North America’s largest flower auction house is in Burnaby, British Columbia!

Cut flowers are typically shipped by plane, unless they are grown locally. For example, around 187,000 tons of flowers go through the Miami International Airport every year.

Globalization and the Cut Flowers Industry

Since the 1990s there has been a shift in production from Europe and North America to developing countries with warmer climates and cheaper labour. The four biggest cut flower exporters are: the Netherlands (55%), Colombia (18%), Ecuador (15%), and Kenya (15%).

The U.S. imports almost 80% of their flowers. Most flowers sold in the U.S. come from Colombia and Ecuador. Two out of every three flowers in the U.S. are imported from Colombia. In Canada, 55% of imported cut flowers are from Colombia, with 26% from Ecuador.[2]

Countries do specialize in certain flower varieties. Here is a list with the top global producer for a few flower varieties:

• Rose: Ecuador

• Tulip: The Netherlands

• Carnation: Colombia

• Orchid: Thailand

• Peony: The Netherlands

The Rise of Supermarket Flowers

75% of the cut flowers market is made up of online retailers and supermarkets. Supermarkets tend to buy lower quality flowers than high-end florists. But they do demand a great deal of uniformity and may require some form of environmental and/or social standards in their supplier codes.

Which is better: supermarket or florist? It’s hard to say across the board. Supermarkets will adopt standards as a risk reduction strategy, whereas florists are drawn to certification either to differentiate themselves or out of a general feeling of responsibility. But most florists (at least in Europe in 2011) are not actively engaged in social and environmental standards as a purchasing criterion or in communication to customers.

Workers’ Rights

As is common with agricultural products (see our episodes on tea and chocolate, for example), flower farm workers in developing countries generally receive low wages and their working conditions are not comfortable. Union busting is common practice in some countries and can be violent.

There are a few workers’ rights issues that are particular to the flower industry.

Special events drive the cut flower industry, especially Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Mother’s Day, and weddings. 77% of flower purchases involve a specific occasion. Because the industry is so heavily event-based, flower farms need a lot of labour in very short time windows. In places with less mechanization and weak labour protections, that means flower workers often have to work very long shifts around key holidays.

Another problem that is especially prominent in the flower industry is worker safety. Specifically, flower workers can be exposed to toxic chemicals without proper protective equipment. Because flowers aren’t consumed, flower growers are allowed to use more pesticides than food farmers.[3] Approximately one-fifth of the chemicals used in the flower industry in developing countries are banned or untested in the US. Without proper protective equipment, farm workers exposed to toxic pesticides can become sick and, in some cases, die.

Sexual assault and harassment have been well-documented in the flower industry in Colombia and Kenya. Like the tea industry, there are a lot of women working in flower farming because they are perceived as being better at handling the plants delicately. In Kenya, for example, there have been accounts of sexual assault as a regular practice and in some cases as a condition of hiring and promotion.

Environment

Transportation

Timing is crucial for the cut flower industry. 45% of flowers die before they are sold. Typically, the time from harvest to sale is 10-12 days. And it is important to keep flowers refrigerated throughout this period, so they don’t spoil. For that reason, cut flowers are transported primarily by air. Of course, this means that transport contributes significantly to the environmental footprint of cut flowers.

That is why some people suggest that consumers think about plant miles – i.e.: how far did the plant travel to get to you?

Greenhouses

However, the fact that flowers are transported by plane does not necessarily mean that it is always better to buy local, from an emissions standpoint.

That is because it takes a lot of energy to heat greenhouses to the temperatures necessary to cultivate flowers in cold places like Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

A life cycle assessment commissioned by Fairtrade International found that “greenhouse gas emissions from air transport of roses from overseas are four to six times lower than  those from heating  the  greenhouses  in  the  Netherlands.” That study looked at the environmental impact of getting roses to Switzerland. So even though obviously the Netherlands is much closer to Switzerland than Kenya, Kenyan roses had a smaller carbon footprint.

So, if you are buying local it is also important to think about flowers that are grown in-season.

Water Use 

A single rose grown in Kenya takes ten litres of water to produce. So, the water footprint of a flower is relatively small (Quick reminder that a 6oz. steak has a water footprint of 2,551 litres).

However, some flower farms are more water efficient than others. And it can matter whether the flower farm is located somewhere that already struggles with water scarcity. Flower farms can impact local communities through water diversion for irrigation and water pollution.

Because of water scarcity in Kenya, the cut flower industry’s water use is a big issue there, for example. Flower producers in Kenya have been connected to pollution in water bodies like Lake Naivasha.

Pesticide Use

As discussed above, the flower industry uses a lot of pesticides. In addition to being a hazard to workers, pesticide use can pollute nearby freshwater and, in some cases, create ocean dead zones.

A study commissioned by Fairtrade International found that Dutch flower producers used less pesticides than Kenyan producers. But among Kenyan producers, fairtrade certified producers in Kenya used fewer pesticides, relative to non-fairtrade producers.

Packaging

Flowers often come wrapped in disposable plastic packaging, which is not ideal. If you can find plastic-free alternatives or buy a bouquet without packaging, do so.

Ethical Certifications

There is a truly overwhelming variety of ethical standards in the cut flower industry. Here is a chart that lists the most relevant standards for European flower and plant buyers:

Source: https://issuu.com/tradefordevelopmentcentre/docs/the_european_market_for_fair_and_sustainable_flowe at p.14

Describing all of these standards would be challenging. But it is worth highlighting a few.

Organic Certification

Organic certification means that pesticides and other harmful chemicals were not used to grow the flower. There are also some other environmental criteria that may be applied. Different countries have different organic labels.

Fairtrade

We have talked about Fairtrade on the podcast before. See the research note from our sugar episode for a detailed description. Fair trade is a social standard that includes values like decent and safe work, fair prices for producers, and sustainability.

Fairtrade has two different types of standards. One stream is for businesses that hire employees. Another is for smallholders who work in farmer co-operatives.

Rainforest Alliance

Rainforest Alliance is an environmental NGO. Its certification system includes social and environmental criteria.

Developing Country Standards

The four largest developing country flower exporters all have their own ethical labels:

• Florverde (Colombia)

• FlorEcuador (Ecuador)

• KFC Code of Practice (Kenya)

• EHPEA Code of Practice (Ethiopia)

Florverde Sustainable Flowers is a social and environmental standard for flower growers in Colombia. It was created based on a code of conduct developed by the Association of Colombian Flower Exporters (Asocolflores). Florverdes includes standards on a number of social and environmental topics, including working conditions, occupational health, sustainability, traceability. Flower growers apply for Florverde certification through independent third party certifiers. As of 2015, 40% of total exports of flowers in Colombia had Florverde certification.

European Standards

There are also a handful of ethical standards developed and used primarily in Europe.

• Fair Flowers Fair Plants (FFP) is a consumer label with social and environmental criteria used mostly used by Dutch growers.

• The EU Ecolabel is an environmental consumer label that assesses compliance with minimum requirements for sustainability or reduction of harm to the environment.

• Flower Label Program (FLP) is a social and environmental certification system mainly in Germany.

Business-to-Business Standards

Some ethical standards are not designed to communicate information to consumers. Instead, business-to-business standards are used by companies that buy a product and apply to companies that produce a product. There are three main sets of business-to-business standards in the flower industry.

The first of these is GLOBALGAP. GLOBAL GAP is a coalition of large European retail chains that defines the elements of “Good Agricultural Practices” (GAP) in areas like crop management, pest control, and worker health and safety. Some other labels (E.g., Florverde) are benchmarked against GLOBALGAP. GLOBALGAP applies to other industries as well. The flower industry standard is the GLOBALGAP Flower and Ornamental Standard.

Next is MPS (“Milieu Project Sierteelt”, which means Floriculture Environmental Project). It was set up as an environmental project by Dutch auctions but now it is active in more than 50 countries. MPS has a series of certificates in different areas. MPS-ABC is the environmental management system, but there is also a social standard (MPS-SQ) and a standard benchmarked against GLOBALGAP (MPS-GAP). Florimark is also a part of MPS and is a certificate for completing certain elements of MPS.

Finally, there is the Ethical Trade Initiative (ETI). ETI is a code of labour practice that focuses on ethical sourcing, used by a coalition of British companies. It is not a certification system, but companies are required to comply with ETI standards. They usually require suppliers to go through a pass/fail audit.

So, How Common is Ethical Certification?

One barrier to certification is low consumer awareness. Only about 10% of consumers are aware that sustainable flowers are available in flower shops. Consumer awareness is highest for Fairtrade.

Consumer awareness may be low, but ethical certification is common in the flower industry. A vast majority of European flower and plant growers participate in one or more certification schemes. “It is not uncommon for African and Latin American producers to hold 5 or more different certificates.” (Trade for Development Centre 2011: p.5)

Certification opens up market segments because some buyers require it. Or it can be a selling feature that differentiates a product or signals quality. For instance, although ethical certification is not required at Dutch auctions, certification through MPS-ABC, FFP, and Florimark are listed at auction.

Generally, certified flowers and plants do not receive higher prices than non-certified products. Certified flowers do go for higher prices at auction, but typically this is due to differences in product quality.

The Slow Flowers Movement

The slow flowers movement encourages consumers to buy flowers grown locally, seasonally, and ethically. Slow also means flowers that are grown “in a considered manner and not rushed through with all sorts of chemicals and artificial interventions.”

What Can You Do?

You can start by looking for flowers that have ethical certification. Ask your local florist or supermarket where they get their flowers! If you are not impressed with the answer, think about finding alternatives. This article from World Vision has a few links to florists that offer fair trade and organic options in Canada.

In general, it is better environmentally to get a potted plant than cut flowers, because they last much longer. For this same reason, you should avoid potted plants that are “designed to die” like poinsettias. Before you buy, Google the plant to ensure that it is not endangered. To get you started, here is an A to Z guide of common house plants.

Endnotes

[1] Business Wars Daily Podcast. (24 February 2021). COVID Ransacked the Cut Flower Industry. Business Wars Daily Podcast episode 653.

[2] Richardson, Courtney. (2014). Love Hurts. Alternatives Journal 40(1): 56-56.

[3] Dundas, Mairead. (7 June 2019). Toxic Cocktail: The Secret Within Your Flowers. France 24 https://www.france24.com/en/20190607-down-earth-pesticides-toxic-chemicals-slow-flowers-bouquets-agriculture-netherlands.

Episode 47 - Biogas with Peter Harris

Kyla and Kristen are joined by Peter Harris, who explains how biowaste can be turned into energy through a process called anaerobic digestion.

Peter Harris is a post-doctoral research fellow for the Centre for Agricultural Engineering. He works on the energy and bio resource recovery team.

When Kristen asked him about using anaerobic digestion in the household, he pointed us to a paper he wrote called Biogas in the Suburbs. He pointed out that the best way to utilize this technology isn’t to use it at home, but to push cities to incorporate it into their waste management systems.

Kyla hosted this episode and prepared nothing, so the notes here are short. Check out the links for more information!

Episode 43 - Ethical Money

Ethical consumption is about bringing your values more clearly into how you spend your money. But what about the money that you’re not spending? The money that you have deposited in a savings account is actually being used all over the world to finance all kinds of economic activity. So, where you put your money – and what happens to it while it’s there – matters.

Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems: Ethical Problems in Banking and Finance

Banks and other financial institutions take money and invest it, with the hope of getting a rate of return so that they can pay interest to customers, provide dividends to shareholders, and generally make a profit. That is a role that is really important, because people and organizations need to be able to access capital in order to invest in stuff that improves productivity, which in turn should benefit everyone.

So, banks and other financial institutions provide an important service that allows capitalism to work. And I don’t mean that as a moral statement of any kind, it’s just functional: in a society where you get resources through transactional exchange, having access to finance is essential and banks facilitate transactions. But because finance carries out this essential function for effectively everything, financial institutions are potentially culpable for a range of ethical problems.

Because financial institutions manage other peoples’ money, they have a fiduciary duty to be responsible with how they use it. That generally means that financial institutions prioritize seeking a return on investment that is either as high as it can be or lower, but more stable. And whether you’re investing retirement savings or you just rely on your bank not to go under, that is important (and not inherently a bad thing).

However, some people argue that financial institutions could achieve a better balance so that ethical practices are brought into decision-making in a more central way. Financial institutions are also a step removed from most ethical harms, so they can be more difficult targets for consumer campaigns.

It would be impossible to develop a comprehensive list of all of the ethical concerns with financial institutions, just because finance touches everything. But it is useful to talk about some of the issues that are the most common targets for consumer pressure. I’ll talk about some environmental, social, and governance problems associated with the financial sector.

After that we’ll talk about what ethical finance is, some of the most common forms that it takes, and debates about ethical finance. Then we will end the episode with some tips about how you can try to bring ethics into your financial decisions. 

Environment

Banks invest in industries that are linked to environmental damage. Climate change is often the focus for activism targeting banking and the environment, but issues like conservation and pollution can feature as well. Banks have provided $2.7 trillion in financing to the fossil fuels industry since the 2015 Paris Agreement

The Rainforest Action Network produces a Fossil Fuel Finance Report, which includes a graphic where you can find information about the top fossil fuel-supporting banks.

o   JP Morgan Chase: $268.59 billion in fossil fuel financing 2016-2019

o   Wells Fargo: $197.91 billion

o   Citi: $187.67 billion

o   Bank of America: $156.92 billion

The fossil fuel divestment movement aims to address climate change by convincing financial institutions and institutional investors to divest from companies that extract fossil fuels. If you are interested in campaigning for fossil free divestment, this website has resources.

There are a number of banks and ethical funds that have committed to divesting from fossil fuels. Some ethical finance aims to promote environmentally friendly projects. One example is carbon offsets, which we discussed in a previous episode.  

Social

Social issues are those connected to the wellbeing of people. Banks have been targeted for financing companies that harm society. This includes things like investment in tobacco companies and private prisons.

Banking and Conflict

The Is Your Bank Loaded campaign grades banks based on their investment in firearms manufacturers. Notably, TD Bank received an F score from this organization.

The organization asks for banks to take a number of steps, including divesting from firearms companies until the US government adopts adequate regulations. Top companies invested $748 billion USD in the nuclear weapons industry. The Don’t Bank on the Bomb campaign reports on the financial institutions that seek to profit from companies that produce key components of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon delivery systems. You can check out their list of who invests and who divests.

Governance

Governance issues are connected to how financial institutions themselves operate.

Tax Avoidance and Evasion

We talked about tax avoidance and evasion in our episode on tax justice. Tax avoidance and evasion is a massive public policy concern: it is unfair, increases inequality, and makes it more difficult for governments to provide good public service. Banks are some of the biggest tax avoiders and they help their clients avoid tax. Oxfam has reported on the use of tax havens by major European banks. 

Banking and Gender

Banking is an industry with a big gender gap. In the UK companies have to report on their gender pay gap. According to those reports, finance firms pay the average man 25% more than the average woman, compared with a 17% pay gap across all sectors.

What is Ethical Banking/Ethical Finance?

In 2018 there was a total of $12 trillion in US-based assets managed using sustainable, responsible and impact (SRI) investing. This was up from $8.1 trillion in 2016 and from under $1 trillion in 1995. That means that today, about 26% of professionally managed financial assets are managed using some kind of sustainable, responsible, and impact investment.

So, that means that some kind of ethical rule was used in the management of about a quarter of financial products in the US in 2018. And this is a category that is growing every year.

Social finance refers to “the allocation of capital primarily for social and environmental returns, as well as in some cases, a financial return”.[1] It is an umbrella term denoting a variety of approaches in which finance is used to advance environmental, social, or governance (ESG) objectives. It “seeks to align investments with the personal values of investors and to harness the resources and power of the financial sector to improve corporate social and environmental behavior”.[2]

But ethical finance is a big category. There are lots of different kinds of issues we might want to consider in terms of ethical content. Ethical finance usually thinks about ethics in terms of three categories: environmental, social, and governance. When you hear the acronym ESG, that’s what that means.

o   Environment: does it advance conservation, sustainability, or decarbonize?

o   Social: does it improve the rights, dignity, and living conditions of people? Does it make society better?

o   Governance: are responsible governance practices being used? How transparent, equitable, democratic, and accountable is it?

There are three broad approaches to ethical finance:[3]

o   Positive: actively investing in good things – pollution management, renewable energy, water efficiency (carbon offsets)

o   Exclusion (divestment): approaches ethical finance from a negative perspective – so rather than actively funding good projects, this would be eliminating certain investments seen as harmful (e.g., tobacco, gambling, pornography, fossil fuels, arms, private prisons)

o   Holistic: where the company managing your finance looks holistically at the ethics of companies in which they are investing your money (e.g., on human rights, taxation, inclusivity, sustainability) and may express voice once invested in that company

Divestment remains the most common kind of ethical finance strategy.[4]

Another way to frame ethical finance is in terms of approaches.[5]

o   Ethical finance: thinking about a personal moral compass;

o   Responsible investing: focused on financial value, but with certain ESG constraints;

o   Impact: thinking about the outcomes that investments are generating and implications for investor preferences

Historically, SRI has been used to confront environmental concerns, board and hiring diversity, international issues like Apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, human rights, animal rights, labor rights, abortion, tobacco, and, more recently, gun violence.[6] As of 2005 Canada had approximately $55 billion USD in assets under management of SRI portfolios.[7]

Institutional investors play a big role in sustainable, responsible, and impact investment. That includes public funds, corporations, educational institutions, foundations, faith-based investors, healthcare funds, labour union pension funds, nonprofits, and family offices.

Does Ethical Finance Work? The Mission versus Returns Debate

There is some debate concerning the extent to which SRI is, and ought to be, motivated by moral concerns – in contrast to evolving understandings of risk. For instance, the carbon bubble or “unburnable carbon” hypothesis suggests that it makes good financial sense to divest from fossil fuels, irrespective of one’s moral views about environmental stewardship.[8] So, it can sometimes be difficult to identify whether ethical motives actually underlie ethical finance.

Why does that matter? Well, in one sense it doesn’t: climate change doesn’t care whether you divest from fossil fuels because you feel morally compelled to or because you’re worried about stranded assets. But in a broader sense: if all ethical investment is really financially driven, that places severe limitations on how effective ethical investment can be as a tool of social change. Because if it ultimately is about making money, then you should target other companies so that the banks see a different financial calculus when assessing investors. But if you can convince consumers and institutional investors to genuinely accept a trade-off between their rate of return in exchange for ethical values, then that is a huge possible source of change. 

How Can People (Who Don’t Have Scrooge McDuck Money) Approach Ethical Finance?

How can you, as a person that uses money, incorporate ethical practices into your financial decisions? This is a topic that deserves its own episode, but I will try to sketch out some of the basics here.

Choosing Your Bank

The first thing you can do is to find out how ethical your bank is, when it comes to ethical issues that matter to you. And you can also check out how your bank compares to others. You can do that on an issue-by-issue basis by checking out the campaigns mentioned above. Ethical Consumer has done a rating on banks. It is from a British perspective, but there are international banks on there. See where your bank stacks up compared to others in their overall rating. If your bank compares badly, it might be time to look at another financial institution.

Try asking your bank directly about their ethical practices, especially if there is one issue in particular that matters to you. Has the bank divested from fossil fuels? Does it apply any ethical criteria on its investments? Are there specific financial products you can access that do utilize ESG criteria. If you do switch banks for ethical reasons, be sure to tell them! Ethical Consumer has a template letter that you can use.

Many of the large, commercial banks rate similarly on ethical issues. So, you may want to go with a different sort of bank: a credit union.

Credit unions are financial co-operatives owned and run by their members. Credit unions are not-for-profits, so any money that is earned is invested back into the organization, distributed to members, or donated. “Credit unions provide a community-focused approach to day-to-day banking, with an emphasis on meeting customers’ needs rather than turning a profit.”

Although being a cooperative does not necessarily mean that ethical investment practices are being used, credit unions are more likely than corporate banks to incorporate ethical criteria in their decision-making. Canada has approximately 700 credit unions and people’s banks [caisses populaires]. In Canada, you can look for credit unions here.

To join a credit union, you have to buy a share in the credit union. In some cases there may be other requirements – for instance, you may need to be a resident of the province the credit union is in. Credit unions offer narrower credit product selection and their online tools are usually worse, but they typically have higher interest rates on their savings accounts, lower account fees, and better customer service. Credit unions operate democratically, so each member has one vote regardless of the size of investments or deposits. A credit union’s board of director is volunteer-run and elected by members. Commercial banks elect their board of directors through shareholders.

The Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV) is a network of banks that are working towards a banking sector that is more transparent and supports economic, social, and environmental sustainability. You can find GABV member banks in your country by going on the GABV website.  Three Canadian financial institutions are GABV members: Kindred Credit Union, Vancity, and la Caisse d’économie solidaire Desjardins [the Desjardins solidarity economy fund] (a partnership between private philanthropic foundations and the Desjardins solidarity economy fund).

And, of course, you can always tell your bank that you want to see them doing more on ethical finance.  

Choosing a Financial Advisor

If you have (or plan to have) a financial advisor, you can find a firm that will incorporate ethical factors.

Start by searching for “financial planner” (or “financial advisor”) and “socially responsible”, “green”, “SRI”, “ESG” or “sustainable investing”. Usually firms that do ethical investing will have this on their website. If ethical criteria are not prominent on the website, it can be a sign that ethics are not central to what the firm does.

But the reverse is not necessarily true: companies may engage in “ethics washing” by marketing themselves as socially responsible without truly incorporating ethics into their investment practices. You can consult the greenwashing guide for more information about funds using greenwash and how to spot greenwash. Or try Ethical Consumer’s guide to ethical investment funds. They also have guides on mortgages and a few other financial products.

By listening to this episode (or reading this research note) you’ve already armed yourself with some of the basics in ethical finance. But it can be worthwhile to read about it a little more – pick the elements that are most interesting to you and make sure you understand the basics. You can also try asking your current financial advisor about ESG or socially responsible index funds. Here is a list of 23 top socially conscious index funds according to Forbes.

Do Your Own Ethical Investing

You can, of course, personally invest in ethical companies by buying shares in ethical companies. But I would not advise this for a large sum of money, unless you are an expert and/or willing to put in a lot of time and effort to learn about investing.

Use Your Voice

Even if you don’t have very much money, like me, you are probably a member of at least one organization that has significant financial assets. Maybe it’s your pension fund, your local schoolboard, your university, or a faith-group you belong to. Get involved with campaigns to make your organizations more ethical investors. Universities and faith groups especially have been very active in the fossil fuel free movement.

Notes

[1] Nicholls, Alex. (2015). Social Finance: Capitalizing Social Impact. In A. Nicholls, R. Paton, and J. Emerson (eds.) Social Finance. New York: Oxford University Press.

[2] Richardson, Benjamin and Peihani, Maziar. (2015). Universal Investors and Socially Responsible Finance: A Critique of a Premature Theory. Banking and Finance Law Review 30(3): 405-455 at p.406.

[3] Money Box Podcast. (1 May 2019). Ethical Investing. BBC Radio 4.

[4] Trinks, Pieter Jan and Scholtens, Ben. (2017). The Opportunity Cost of Negative Screening in Socially Responsible Investing. Journal of Business Ethics 140: 193-208.

[5] Fintech Insider Podcast. (2 October 2020). Insights: ESG and Sustainable Investing – the Ethical Future of Finance. Fintech Insider Podcast.

[6] See, e.g.: Hoffman, A.J. (1996). A Strategic Response to Investor Activism. Sloan Management Review 37(2), 51-64; Tkac, Paula. (2006). One Proxy at a Time: Pursuing Social Change through Shareholder Proposals. Economic Review-Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta 91(3), 1-20; Vitols, “European Pension Funds and Socially Responsible Investment”; Renneboog, Luc, Ter Horst, Jenke, Zhang, Chendi. (2008). Socially Responsible Investments: Institutional Aspects, Performance, and Investor Behavior. Journal of Banking and Finance 32: 1723-1742.

[7] Renneboog, Ter Horst, and Zhang, “Socially Responsible Investments”.

[8] Lorinc, John. (19 January 2016). The Tragedy of the Horizon. Corporate Knights, http://www.corporateknights.com/channels/leadership/the-tragedy-of-the-horizon-14531832/.

Episode 39 - COVID-19, Wildfires, and the Climate Crisis

In this episode we were joined by past guest Robert Miller to discuss the west coast wildfires and the climate crisis. Below are Kristen’s notes for the episode, and some of the questions we asked Robbie throughout.

West Coast Wildfires

Right now, there are 1,576 active wildfires burning across the western US. There have been 43,785 wildfires in the US this year, which have burned 7 million acres this year. This is over one million more acres burned than the 10-year average. As of September 23, there were more than 30,000 firefighters and support personnel assigned to wildfires.

California has been the worst off. The first, third, and fourth largest fires in California’s history all happened in 2020. There have been at least 26 fatalities from the fires and 7,196 structures have been damaged or destroyed.

But the wildfires haven’t occurred only in California. They have also burned throughout Washington, Oregon, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. At one point, ten percent of Oregon’s population was under an evacuation alert. And pretty well the entire west coast of the US was covered by air pollution advisories over a span of a few days. Wildfire smoke even impacted the eastern part of the continent.

Wildfires do occur naturally, but climate change is extending the wildfire season and making it more intense. That is because warmer temperatures prompt earlier snowmelts and higher temperatures, which result in drier soil and vegetation that is more prone to wildfires for longer periods of time. Also, climate change makes forests more prone to beetle infestations, which in turn makes them more likely to burn.  Leaders at CalFire have even suggested that they no longer have a wildfire season, since California now deals with wildfires year-round.

From 2000 to 2018, wildfires burned more than twice as much land area per year as in the period of 1985-1999. It is projected that a 1 degree temperature increase would increase the median area burned by as much as 600% in some forests. (80% of wildfires are started by people.)

The Metronome building in New York has a digital clock that usually counts down the hours, minutes, and seconds until midnight. Instead, it is currently counting down the time until Earth runs out of its carbon budget. The installation was designed by two artists (Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd). We have 7 years (and 98 days on 24 September) to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees.

The Climate Movement in 2020

The global day of climate action will have just happened when we release this episode, so we thought this would be a good opportunity to reflect on where the climate movement is at and where it needs to go in 2020 and beyond.

Last year, it felt like a moment for climate activism. The global climate strike drew large crowds in countries around the world, climate change leapt to the top of political agendas, and climate groups like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement all had a lot of momentum. When I look at 2020, it really doesn’t seem like there is that same momentum.

There are still 3,133 strikes planned around the world for 25 September 2020. But that’s a lot less than the 5,668 in September 2019.

What are some of the biggest accomplishments of the climate movement to-date, in your view?

What are some of its biggest weaknesses?

Impact of the Pandemic on Climate Activism

There definitely is climate activism happening – earlier in September 300 Extinction Rebellion protesters were arrested in London at climate protests. 13 were arrested for blockading Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corp (which publishes the Sun, the Times, and the Daily Mail in the UK). That prompted a big debate over there about protests tactics and the freedom of the press.

But activism has been much more muted this year. To what extent is that a result of the pandemic, versus other things?

Do you think climate activism will be able to regain the momentum it had in 2019? How?

Racial Justice and Climate Activism’s Whiteness Problem

Can you tell me a bit about the links between climate change and racial justice?

Climate change is a racial justice problem, so in theory climate activism and racial justice activism should go hand-in hand. But in practice, not always. Do you think climate activism has a whiteness problem?

A Green Recovery?

People have talked a lot about climate gains as a silver lining of the pandemic. Which is kind of gross from the point of view of respecting human life and suffering. But it’s also overblown: even with stay at home orders, we are on track to emit 92% as much carbon as last year.  

One major question is whether governments will prioritize a green and just pandemic recovery, or if austerity will win the day.  

Bill Gates had a really depressing fact in a recent article:

“As of last week [article came out August 4, 2020], more than 600,000 people are known to have died from COVID-19 worldwide. On an annualized basis, that is a death rate of 14 per 100,000 people. How does that compare with climate change? Within the next 40 years, increases in global temperatures are projected to raise global mortality rates by the same amount – 14 deaths per 100,000. By the end of the century, if emissions growth stays high, climate change could be responsible for 73 extra deaths per 100,000 people. In a lower emissions scenario, the death rate drops to 10 per 100,000. In other words, by 2060, climate change could be just as deadly as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.”

Worldwide, 71% of people agree that climate change is as serious a crisis as COVID-19. Canada and the US had some of the lower figures for this, but still over half agreed.

One possible sign of hope for a green recovery is the sudden prevalence of “build back better” in documents on pandemic recovery. The UN and OECD have used this language, as has the Joe Biden campaign, the Government of the United Kingdom, and the Government of Canada.

Canada’s Throne Speech and Climate Change 

In Canada, the government released its Throne Speech on Wednesday 23 September. The Throne Speech sets out government’s priorities and it was seen as the document articulating how Canada will handle pandemic recovery.

The government pledged that “Climate action will be a cornerstone of our plan to support and create a million jobs across the country.”

Key initiatives:

• The Government of Canada committed to legislating a goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. Which, notably, is the commitment that the Green Party campaigned on in 2019.

• The Government also said that it would invest in retrofitting homes and buildings; disaster resilient infrastructure; public transit; zero-emissions vehicles; zero-emissions technology companies; and urban parks.

• The government also pledged to plant 2 billion trees and reaffirmed its commitment to ban single-use plastics.

• But it also said that it would “support” several polluting sectors, including oil and gas, during the transition. 

What did you think about the government’s commitments on climate change in the throne speech, Robbie?

Given that Canada has missed its Paris Accord targets so far, do you think the net-zero commitment matters on its own? Or will it all come down to the quality of the measures that they introduce in the budget?

Final notes:
Robbie mentioned a photo of wildfire smoke meeting hurricane Paulette, here it is!
Are we running out of names for our tropical storms? Yup! This is the second time (ever) we’ve had to move to the Greek alphabet because we ran out of letters.

Check out our other episodes on COVID-19:
Kristen and Kyla React to COVID-19
COVID-19 and Inequality with Alix Jansen
Ten Unexpected Effects of COVID-19
Art, Artists, and COVID-19

Episode 35 - Eating Insects

Kristen is on vacation, so Kyla took the reigns on this look into the future of eating insects. This was a topic we had discussed when originally brainstorming for the show, and we’re excited to finally eat our cricket powder.

A lot of the information for this episode was taken from a 2013 paper by the FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. It’s called Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security. Before this report came out, there was very little conversation happening on the subject, so this kick-started the discussion.

History of Eating Insects

The practice of eating insects is called entomophagy, and we’ve been doing it since prehistoric times. Shoutout to the wiki article on entomophagy which is extremely well written. I recommend checking it out as a starting point for those who want to learn more after the episode.

Around 2 billion people eat insects around the world, mostly in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and even a bit in Australia and New Zealand, although it’s less common from my experience. It’s more taboo in western culture, but it shouldn’t be! It’s slowly becoming more acceptable in western cultures to eat insects, and in Seattle toasted grasshoppers are a big hit at Mariners baseball games.

There are about 2000 arthropods globally that are known to be safe for human consumption. Arthropods are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. The category includes insects, arachnids, myriapods (centipedes, millipedes etc), and crustaceans. So if you’re eating crab and lobster, you’re already partway there. Crickets are so similar to shellfish they put allergy warnings on cricket powder saying people with shellfish allergies may react to cricket as well.

It’s kind of funny that we eat lobster, which used to be fed to servants and prison inmates until rules were passed to prevent something considered so cruel. Perhaps we’ll soon be there with bugs!

So why don’t we eat them in the west? A New York Times article suggests that because Europe spent so much of it’s history covered in ice, it only has about 2% of the world’s edible insects and they don’t get nearly as big as they do in warmer climates, so they were never worth hunting. We associate them with things that are dirty or decaying or carrying disease. Also the bible says not to do it (Leviticus 11:41 ‘And every creeping thing that creeps on the earth shall be an abomination. It shall not be eaten.’) so that’s that. Early explorers saw people eating insects in different countries and viewed it as animal-like. As Europeans took over large parts of the world, they took the idea of not eating insects with them, so we can thank colonialism for setting us way back on this one. Missionaries were especially influential in Africa and changed the way people viewed eating insects.

To be fair, it’s not like we’re super weird for not eating insects. Out of 800,000 arthropods, only 2000 are edible. But that same article says we can expect rapid growth in demand in the west for insects in the next few years, which is promising because there’s lots of great reasons to eat bugs!

Surprise, we already eat bugs!

Each year we eat 2lbs of insects! What?? They wind up in food like peanut butter, spices, or canned fruit and veg. The US FDA allows certain quantities to pass into the food Americans buy. “For every ¼ cup of cornmeal, the FDA allows an average of one or more whole insects, two or more rodent hairs and 50 or more insect fragments, or one or more fragments of rodent dung.” - CNN

Not to mention honey. A teaspoon of honey represents the lifetime regurgitation of 50 bees. So we’re already consuming hidden insects and the byproducts of insects. Pass the cricket powder! 

What insects do people eat?

The most popular are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets.

I saw scorpions on sticks in Beijing, and bought mealworm and cricket powder here in Canada. In Australia, on a tour I did in Darwin, ants are picked right off of trees and eaten by brave tourists. They taste citrusy and are high in vitamin C.

In Kushihara Japan there’s an annual wasp festival where wasp-hunters sell snacks like wasp mochi, chocolate wasps, and full wasp nests. It’s all considered a delicacy.

There are loads of insects to eat! Dragonflies, grubs, termites, the list goes on.

Why Eat Bugs?

Everyone who eats insects say they’re tasty. 2 billion people aren’t eating bugs because they DON’T taste good. Apparently stinkbugs taste like apples. But just as important, they’re sustainable alternatives to the meat industry.

From an article by Samuel Imathiu from the University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya

“The current research evidence shows that edible insects can play a significant role in addressing food and nutrition insecurities and this should be encouraged. Scientific evidence shows that edible insects’ nutritional quality is equivalent and sometimes exceeds that of animal-based foods. This and the fact that edible insects have a faster growth rate, high food conversion efficiency and requires less resources to rear compared to livestock should make them a more attractive quality food source especially to the rural poor in the developing countries.”

Environmental Benefits

We’ve talked a lot already in previous episodes about how animal agriculture is a big culprit in climate change, but as a refresher, livestock account for 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and use about 70% of the world’s agricultural land. And production is expected to ramp up as global demand continues to increase. As countries become wealthier, and more urbanized, they’re meat consumption grows. So, fighting climate change means overhauling our current food system. Eating insects can help in a few ways.

1) Insects can be fed on food industry by-products, which helps reduce waste and environmental contamination. This would be more for the insects being raised as feed for other animals. For people, we want to feed bugs food grade food. Or if the waste they’re eating is food waste like apple cores and melon rinds, stuff like that, then it would probably be alright for us. But this needs more study, and most of the farms I looked into feed them a grain meal. Here is a little more information than we went into on the episode.

2) Less food waste, since the whole cricket is being used. In addition, Entomo Farms (where I got my cricket powder) says their crickets’ manure and sheddings, called frass, are sold to farmers and gardeners as high quality fertilizer.

3) Insects emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs. Methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases, is produced by only a few insect groups, such as termites and cockroaches. Overall, bugs produce one tenth as much methane as conventional livestock. When compared to chickens, which are greener than bigger livestock, crickets emit half as much C02 and use 25 percent less water. From the FAO paper:

4) They need less land, water, and food, and you don’t have to clear cut spaces to raise them. “Because they are cold-blooded, insects are very efficient at converting feed into protein (crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein)”.

As an email from Entomo Farms put it “less feed means less land, water, fertilizers, and transportation”. However, this is a little contested. When fed certain organic waste diets they’ve been found to have the same feed conversion as chickens. The feed the big farms use do make them more efficient, but everyone is still trying to figure out the best stuff to feed them.

By 2025, nearly 2 billion people are expected to be living with water scarcity, and more than half of our freshwater is being used in agriculture. 1kg of animal protein requires 5-20 times more water than 1kg of grain protein, or 100 times if you include the water required for forage and grain production to feed the animals. 1kg of beef requires 22000-43000 litres of fresh water. Cricket needs less, although the numbers are all over the place when I look it up. The highest estimates were 100-250l, but one source said 10l and another said 1l. Regardless, at the highest estimate it’s still a huge drop from the water requirements of cows.

For land, you need about 200 square metres to grow 1lb of beef, but you only need 15 square metres to grow 1lb of cricket. They could be good for vertical farming if they’re being kept in crates. One farm said 10’x3’ crates are used, but they can be kept in smaller boxes for small scale operations.

5) Insects are ready to eat way faster than other animals. They transform from larva to adults within weeks. There are loads of species of crickets, but most of them die of old age after 10 weeks, and none live more than a year.

As a bonus, all of the ways bugs are more environmentally friendly than livestock also makes them cheaper. While it’s still a little pricey to get insects here in Canada, it will become more cost effective for the consumer when everyone is eating them.

Eating insects isn’t just for people. They can be used to feed pets and livestock! We’ll probably have to start using them as our food’s food. The FAO figures worldwide production of animal feed will have to increase by as much as 70 percent to be able to feed the world by 2050, when we’ll have around 9 billion people on the planet. Switching from meat meal, fish meal, and soybean meal would help mitigate the production problems that come with those industries. We’ve talked about these problems in our milk, vegetarian, and seafood episodes in a bit more detail.

Health Benefits

Insects contain loads of protein, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. They’re loaded with omega 3 fats, iron, magnesium, calcium, zinc, and fibre. The exoskeleton of insects actually makes their fibre content pretty high. This obviously varies widely based on the insects being eaten. There are nearly 2000 remember! But for the most part they’re hella good for you.

Entomo Farms talk about the nutrients in cricket powder on their site and use what I think is a misleading metric, which is comparing the nutrients to beef, pound for pound. My cricket powder was really expensive, and I won’t be able to eat a whole pound of cricket the same way I could eat a cheese burger. Or at least I can’t yet, I demand a cricket cheeseburger!
Although, 2tbsp have 400% of my B12 intake. So maybe I don’t need a cricket burger. But if I do want one, I just have to wait; as production ramps up, price will go down.

“Compared with mammals and birds, insects may also pose less risk of transmitting zoonotic infections to humans, livestock and wildlife, although this topic requires further research.” So mad cow and H1N1 and salmonella for example appear to be less likely to be transmitted. But because we’re not farming insects on large scale right now, more research should be done.

Pest Harvesting and Lifting People out of Poverty

From the wiki article on Entomophagy: Some researchers have proposed entomophagy as a solution to policy incoherence created by traditional agriculture, by which conditions are created which favor a few insect species, which then multiply and are termed "pests". In parts of Mexico, the grasshopper Sphenarium purpurascens is controlled by its capture and use as food. Such strategies allow decreased use of pesticide and create a source of income for farmers totaling nearly US$3000 per family. Environmental impact aside, some argue that pesticide use is inefficient economically due to its destruction of insects which may contain up to 75 percent animal protein in order to save crops containing no more than 14 percent protein.

“In the past two decades, villagers in impoverished north-eastern Thailand have started housing crickets in concrete pens in their backyards. As demand for the insects has risen, so have profits: One farmer reportedly went from selling 10 kilograms to more than two tons a day. Now around 20,000 such farms have been established, collectively earning more than $3 million a year.” - New York Times

Is It Cruel?

As Kristen has said before on the show, it’s a little tricky when you look at how one cow can feed a number of people, while a number of crickets are needed to feed one person. So is it ethical to do that?

There hasn’t been much research done on insect welfare and laws are suuuuper loose about how to raise and protect insects. The farm I bought my powder from puts the cricket welfare in their advertising, but I don’t think we should rely on the kindness of cricket farmers entirely.

It’s most likely that insects do not feel pain, but we’re not sure. So, the safest thing to do is to regulate the treatment of insects in farming. Kristen was a little skeptical of the “they probably don’t feel pain?” argument I offered, so here’s all the reading I did on it to land on that unhelpful statement.

It’s pretty easy to kill insects humanely and unlike mammals, they like living in high density situations. It’s important to regulate the slaughter methods, because there are humane ways to do it, such as lowering the temperature until they go into hibernation and then eventually die (24hrs to be safe), and inhumane, like boiling, frying, steaming, roasting, etc. There are some that are served and eaten still alive, which ranks pretty low on my humane scale.

Entomo says they treat the crickets ethically. They live at least 80% of their natural life cycle in large open rooms instead of crates. They roam freely and have constant access to food and water. I guess that’s better?

For farms that do use crates, they’re reasoning is that crates can be stacked to use space more efficiently and they’re usually given nooks and crannies and objects to climb on and hide in, for they’re comfort.

Brian Tomasik, who writes about reducing animal suffering, argues that eating insects isn’t ethical, and one of his best points was: is it ethical to bring more insects into existence in farming operations, if their lives are worse off than in their natural habitat? Even if large farms do a good job, amateur farms are likely to cause harm by neglect or making mistakes, like forgetting to feed and water them.

What do you think?

Downsides of Eating Insects

We have to be careful of over-doing it. Most insects are still harvested from the wild rather than farmed, so it’s possible to accidentally destroy the local insect population. From what I could find this is pretty rare, but still something to consider.

Wild caught insects are also more likely to have pesticides if they’ve been hanging around crops, which is a bad thing for us to be eating.

Because production isn’t mainstream, there needs to be more studies done on concentrations of heavy metals, pesticides, and allergens. Also, infrastructure and machinery for mainstream harvesting is still new and it’s loosely regulated or not regulated at all in most countries. It’s hard to know how safe the production process is for turning out food. If insects are being raised on farms with poor quality or straight up rotten feed, then humans are getting that nasty bacteria.

We have to be careful about introducing insects into environments where they might cause harm. It’s difficult to bring live insects into Australia, for example, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. While farms might remain mostly closed, it’s gotta be pretty hard to contain them fully.

Because farming insects is not a well understood industry, scaling it up to meet the demands of a population pushing 8 billion people will probably bring surprise issues that are difficult to see now but obvious in hindsight.

They look nasty as fuck. I read an article by Angela Skujins who tried to eat insects in every meal for a week, and it was a huge failure, she lost 4 pounds and thought she’d die of starvation.

Crickets still need to eat food. So they’ll still require crops and energy from heating their facilities (although because they like darkness, a bit of energy is saved by keeping the lights out).

Overall, if you’re looking for the most ethical diet, it’s still vegan.

So Are We All Going To Be Eating Insects?

The industry is slowly growing. In 2018 Sainsbury’s in the UK started carrying Crunchy Roasted Crickets. Whole Foods and Loblaw here in Canada also apparently stock it, although I’ve never noticed and I’ll have to watch out for it now. More than 100 companies currently exist that produce their own branded foods made from insects.

The industry was worth less than a billion dollars in 2019, but is projected to be worth as much as 8 billion dollars by 2030.

Aspire Food Group, a farm in Texas, is ramping up the size of it’s operation because demand for cricket powder is so high.

So will people eat bugs? Yeah probably someday. Sushi was very stigmatized when it was first introduced in the west but grew popular because restaurants put it on their menus and patrons trusted the chefs to present something edible. We might just be one popular restaurant chain and an influencer munching on a cricket burger away from cricket chips in every cupboard.

Further Info

Fun Fact of the episode: when crickets are ready to mate, they make their chirping noise. If a whole bunch of them are ready to go at once, it gets hella loud in the big farms and farmers have to wear headphones.

Here is a great short video on eating insects!

And another!

And a podcast episode from Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything

Episode 33 - Carbon Offsets

What Are Carbon Offsets?

Carbon offsets compensate for emissions by financing emissions-reducing projects somewhere else in the world. So, to take an example from Umair Irfan’s Vox article: let’s say a steel mill wants to reduce its emissions. Rather than waiting years to install new zero-emissions technology, the steel mill could start mitigating its emissions immediately by buying carbon offsets.

Types of projects

• Deforestation prevention

• Renewable energy projects, biogas projects

• Methane capture

• Energy demand projects: energy efficiency, like distributing efficient cookstoves

The cost of carbon offsets varies, but typically the price is around $12 USD/tonne of CO2 offset.

For context, a flight from Toronto to Vancouver generates about 0.6 tonnes of carbon. I used the Less Emissions calculator for my upcoming Ottawa – Edmonton roundtrip flight, and it came out to 1.1 tonnes of carbon, which cost $27 CAD to offset through a Gold Standard-certified international offset project (there was a cheaper option available but it was CSA-Standard Certified). The Carbonzero calculator estimated 1.45 tonnes for the same flight path, so I’m not sure what accounts for the difference there.

The average Ontarian uses about 11 tonnes of carbon annually. Half of that total comes from driving a car (2.2 tonnes), home heating (1.7 tonnes), air travel (1.4 tonnes), and eating beef (0.5 tonnes).

As a consumer, you can also buy some goods and services that include carbon neutrality as part of the price.

Who Does Carbon Offset Projects?

It’s a combination of businesses and NGOs.[1]

Who Is Using Carbon Offsets?

Globally, there is about $300 million per year in sales of voluntary carbon credits, trading almost 100 million metric tons of carbon.

The compliance offsets market (the market for carbon credits used to meet legally binding caps on carbon in schemes like the EU’s Emissions Trading System) is much larger, at somewhere between $40 billion and $120 billion.

Heavy emitters lean on carbon offsets more than other industries, because it is more difficult for them to decarbonize without a fundamental change in their business models – so, sectors like agriculture, aviation, and oil and gas.[2] Airlines are among the most vocal sectors on using emissions offsets.[3]

There is over 100 markets for carbon offsets already.[4] A lot of carbon offsets are built for compliance markets – so that companies can meet emissions targets when there is something like a cap and trade system in place.[5] For example, California’s cap-and-trade program allows companies to offset a small percentage of their carbon output with forest preservation projects in North America. The three biggest markets for carbon offsets are China, India, and the US.[6]

Consumers buy offsets, often by clicking the option when buying an air ticket. But others will purchase offsets as part of a commitment to carbon neutrality or to offset big carbon expenses like air fare. Governments also buy carbon offsets. For instance, Norway is the world’s largest supporter of the REDD scheme.

Major Carbon Offset/Credit Schemes

There are at least three United Nations schemes. The largest carbon offset scheme is the Clean Development Mechanism, a program that came out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Clean Development Mechanism has a poor track record of meaningful reductions in emissions.

Joint Implementation is the other offsetting mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol. It enables countries with emissions reductions commitments to generate Emission Reduction Units (ERUs) and to transfer them to other countries. Joint Implementation is responsible for issuing one-third of all Kyoto offset credits. There are serious weaknesses with JI.

Then there is also the UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). And a UN Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) will start in 2021.

There are other government-run schemes, such as the California Air Resources Board forest standard and new tropical standard. Canada is planning to establish an offsets market in the future. And there are a bunch of private carbon offset companies, such as Less and Carbonzero.

Principles of Good Carbon Offset Programs

From a positive point of view, carbon offsets put a price on pollution. Which can be a good thing and is the justification behind carbon taxes and other market-based climate policies.

For carbon offsetting to address climate change, there are several things that offsetting schemes must accomplish: additionality; third-party verification; permanence; avoiding leakage; social and environmental safeguards; and offset limits.

Additionality

It is important that carbon offset projects are effective, but that is not enough. That’s why carbon offsets experts talk about something called additionality. Additionality means asking: would this have happened anyway? Is the revenue from carbon offsetting actually supporting brand new decarbonization efforts? You have to be able to count reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

Additionality is the biggest measure of quality in a carbon offsetting project.[7] Clean energy projects have low additionality. Renewable energy projects already generate renewable energy certificates and they already have subsidy support. Although clean energy projects are the lowest quality type of carbon offset project, they are the biggest category of carbon offsets.[8]

You can much more directly claim additionality for reforestation projects (tree-planting).[9] Energy demand projects also have high additionality – that is things like clean cookstove distribution and energy efficiency projects.[10]

Some offset providers guarantee emissions savings, which essentially means that if the emissions savings don’t occur or if they turn out not to be additional the provider would make up the loss with another project.

In 2015 a French study found that 37% of REDD projects overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks.

Measurement and Third-Party Verification

Like with any social or environmental standard, you want to ensure that the standards are being verified by third-party auditors. Measuring emissions savings can be tricky. Some projects are much more difficult to measure than others. A methane capture project simply involves installing a sensor at, say, a coal mining operation. For forestry projects, you have to use satellite imagery to make sure that tree is still standing year after year. That’s difficult and expensive to do.[11]

Permanence

Permanence means: if you reduce the carbon with this project, is it going to stay sequestered? This is one of the main critiques of reforestation offsetting projects. Forests could be cut down or destroyed before emissions reductions have been generated. If you cut down a tree before 100 years, all of that carbon gets released into the atmosphere.[12]

Avoiding Leakage

Leakage refers to a situation where emissions reductions in one area result in greater emissions somewhere else. For example, forest protection somewhere could lead to logging somewhere else.

Social and Environmental Safeguards

Carbon offsetting should have safeguards to ensure that the project isn’t harming communities or undermining other environmental objectives. Without these safeguards, carbon offset projects can have negative impacts on local populations. For instance, a windfarm project displaced local farmers and didn’t generate the expected amount of power. And a 2015 green dam project in Guatemala was linked to the killing of six Indigenous protesters, two of which were children. That project is funded by the World Bank and will produce tradeable carbon credits.

Problems with Carbon Offsetting

The biggest problem with carbon offsetting is that a lot of projects fail to meet the principles described above. In particular, most carbon offset projects fail to meet the standard of additionality. But here are a few other common critiques.

Measurability and Pricing

Measurability issues can drive up the price of a carbon offsets project. As a result of measurability issues, reforestation projects – which are some of the potentially most effective projects from a sequestration perspective – are largely left out of carbon offset schemes.

Is this a Racket? A Scam?

Opaqueness of pricing of carbon offset projects undermines the legitimacy of the whole market. Companies have an incentive to choose a baseline scenario with inflated emissions, and that has occurred.

There is also evidence of fraud, exaggeration, and double-counting. In some cases, projects never get carried out – such as the example of a tree planting project in Panama. The carbon offsetting market continues to improve. While a decade ago, carbon offsets were a “wild west”, today there is a bit more structure.

Still, though, emissions reductions are overestimated in about 85% of offsets projects. Only 2% of projects have a high likelihood that emissions reductions are additional and are not over-estimated.

Moral Hazard

The climate advocate George Monbiot famously compared carbon offsets to indulgences in a 2006 Guardian column. His point was basically that carbon offsets make consumers and businesses complacent about the need to reduce our consumption. From that article:

“Any scheme that persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay. The big cuts have to be made now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home. They are telling us we don't need to be citizens; we need only to be better consumers.”

 One thing that I think is pretty funny about this comparison is the fact that the Vatican used carbon offsets to declare itself the “first carbon-neutral sovereign state” in 2007. (Of course, the project they paid for never actually got done, so…)

There is also a cheeky site called CheatNeutral that pokes fun at carbon offsets by allowing you to be infidelity neutral by funding someone else to be faithful.

Some people have taken aim at these analogies. David Roberts at Grist has said the following about the indulgences comparison:

“If there really were such a thing as sin, and there was a finite amount of it in the world, and it was the aggregate amount of sin that mattered rather than any individual's contribution, and indulgences really did reduce aggregate sin, then indulgences would have been a perfectly sensible idea.”

But there is still the question of whether people (and businesses) use offsetting as a way to avoid changing other behaviours.

Reliance on Capitalism/Market Solutions

This argument is basically:

“Look, I think that we should save forests. Totally agree that we should save forests. I just don’t think that we should use capitalism to save forests. I don’t understand why everyone wants to use capitalism for everything.”[13]

Incrementalism

Carbon offsets can’t actually reduce emissions. At best, all they do is cancel out emissions that have already been produced. That can be a good thing, but when you take into account time horizons it is actually a big problem. Some offset projects – tree planting, for instance – can take decades to have emissions saving effects, if they ever do. And given the lock-in effects of climate change, not to mention the risk of run-away climate change, it might all be too little, too late. Carbon offsets have been around for decades, yet emissions are still increasing.

Low-Hanging Fruit

Offsets are cheap in part because there are lots of ways to reduce emissions very inexpensively. We could refer to these as quick wins. But what happens when the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings are used up?

Carbon Offset Certification Schemes

One way to ensure that you are buying carbon offsets that adhere to the principles set out above is to get offsets that adhere to a respected certification standard.

Voluntary Gold Standard

Voluntary Gold Standard (VGS) -certified offsets are audited according to the rules set out in the Kyoto Protocol. The Gold Standard is the highest global standard for carbon offsets. It’s the standard that the David Suzuki Foundation recommends using if you are going to buy carbon offsets.

Voluntary Carbon Standard

Voluntary Carbon Standard is the world’s most widely-used voluntary emissions certification program.

Other Third-Party Verification

Here are a few other third-party offset verification standards:

• CSA Standard-Certified Canadian Offsets

• Green-e

• American Carbon Registry

• Climate Action Reserve

• Climate, Community, and Biodiversity Standard

• Verra

• Rainforest Alliance

Should I Use Carbon Offsets?

For people and businesses, carbon offsetting should be a final lifeline: it should be something you do after you have done everything reasonable to reduce your emissions. 

For example, the sustainable shoe brand Allbirds has a three-step approach to carbon neutrality.

1. Measure emissions across the supply chain, including product end of life. They include a carbon score with all of their shoes. For instance, the runners that I bought this year from them have a footprint of 9.0 kilograms of carbon (which is below the average of 13.6 kilograms for running shoes generally). 

2. Reduce the carbon impact.

3. Offset anything that’s left.

That is generally the way companies should approach offsets. (As a quick note: while Allbirds is well-rated for environmental sustainability and animal welfare, Good On You has pointed out serious weaknesses in its labour practices.)

You should be extremely skeptical of any company that is using offsets as the main approach to sustainability. For example, a BBC investigation calculated that in order to offset the annual emissions of Ryan Air (which is positioning itself as the greenest airline), you would need to plant enough trees to cover 12% of the UK.[14]

As an individual, I would liken carbon offsets to donating to charity. It doesn’t get you out of your core ethical responsibilities, but you can use it to improve your overall moral contribution. Buy carbon offsets only where there are no feasible green alternatives (e.g., important long-distance air travel).

You can justifiably use carbon offsetting as a way to cut your overall footprint or as an incentive to be greener – like a self-applied carbon tax. But you may as well just donate to your favourite environmental group. In the episode, Robert makes the good point that our society’s obsession with measurement can get in the way of impact.

The real criticisms with carbon offsets come from businesses that use flawed offsets programs to meet government emissions standards.

Which Carbon Offsets Should I Buy?

Buy certified offsets, preferably from a standard with a registry of projects. Less.ca has several options for certified offsets and you can see the projects associated with them. This was also the top-rated offset program in a David Suzuki report (though it’s over a decade old now). Make sure the project is registered – that ensures that offsets are only sold once. Another suggestion is to choose projects that specifically help the world transition away from fossil fuels.

Endnotes

[1] Switched On Podcast. 19 May 2020. When Enough’s Not Enough, Try Carbon Offsets. Switched On Podcast.

[2] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[3] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[4] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[5] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[6] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[7] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[8] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[9] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[10] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[11] Switched On Podcast, “When Enough’s Not Enough.”

[12] The Energy Gang Podcast. 2019. The Problem with Carbon Offsets. The Energy Gang Podcast.

[13] The Energy Gang Podcast, “The Problem with Carbon Offsets.”

[14] BBC Panorama. 11 November 2019. Can Flying Go Green? BBC, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPhOS4uXkmM&feature=youtu.be.

Episodes 26, 27 and 29 - Palm Oil

What is Palm Oil?

Palm oil comes from the fruit of oil palm trees (elaeis guineensis). Palm kernel oil comes from crushing the kernel (the stone in the middle of the fruit). 66 million tons of palm oil is produced annually, making it the most commonly produced vegetable oil. Global production of palm oil has doubled in the last decade. Palm oil plantations cover more than 27 million hectares of the Earth’s surface.

There are approximately 200 alternate names for palm oil and palm oil derivatives used in cleaning products and cosmetics, which can make it really difficult to know if there is palm oil in what you’re buying.[1]

But here’s a trick: there are four root words that give you an indication that an ingredient might be palm oil-derived (but not necessarily so):

Palm-

• Palm kernel oil

• Palm fruit oil

• Palmate

• Palmolein

• Palmitate

• Palmitic acid

• Palmityl alcohol

• Hydrated palm glycerines

• Etyl palmitate

Stear-

• Sodium stearate

• Stearic acid

• Pentataerythrityl tetraisostearate

• Octyldodecyl stearoyl stearate

Laur-

• Sodium lauryl lactylate

• Sodiul lauryl sulphate

• Sodium laureth sulfare

Glyc-

• Glyceryl

• Hydrogenated palm glycerides

But there are a bunch of palm derivatives that don’t use these roots (e.g., sodium kernelate, elaeis guineensis) and sometimes palm oil can be labelled more generically, as vegetable fat or vegetable oil. Here is a list of 25 sneaky names for palm oil. If you live in an EU country, palm oil can’t be labelled as a generic vegetable oil.[2]

More than 50% of packaged supermarket products contain palm oil. Palm oil is in:

• Packaged foods like pizza (dough), doughnuts, chocolate, margarine, noodles, ice cream, bread, chips, cookies. It’s used where you need fat of some kind.

• Personal care products and cosmetics like deodorant, shampoo, toothpaste, and lipstick. Some cleaning products also.

• Animal feed

• Biofuels

It is also a popular cooking oil in Asian and African countries. 40% of the world’s palm oil is consumed in China, India, and Pakistan.[3] The food industry used about 72% of all palm oil, cosmetics/cleaning take another 18%, and the remaining 10% goes to biofuels and animal feed.[4]

Why is Palm Oil in Everything?

Palm oil has a lot of useful properties. It is semi-solid at room temperature, so it can keep spreads spreadable. It is resistant to oxidation, so it can give products a longer shelf-life. It is stable at high temperatures, so it helps give fried products a crispy and crunchy texture. And it is odorless and colourless, so it doesn’t alter the look or smell of food products. 

Palm oil is also used in some products for its health properties. Palm oil doesn’t have trans-fat and has a lower saturated fat concentration than butter. Other vegetable oils have to be partially hydrogenated to make them more solid, but that process of artificial hydrogenation creates trans-fatty acids.[5] Palm oil is naturally hydrogenated. When scientific consensus was forming around trans-fats, Unilever led the shift to palm oil in food products. 

Palm oil and palm oil derivatives also replaced animal-based fats in foods, as well as cleaning and personal care products (E.g., soaps with animal tallow[6]). Palm oil and palm kernel oil possessed the same properties as animal tallow, which made them the only suitable plant-based alternative.[7] Consumers were already pushing the market toward plant-based alternatives, but the BSE outbreaks in the late 1980s and early 1990s triggered a larger shift toward palm oil.[8] The consumption of animal fats per capita reached its peak in the 1980s and has been in decline since.

Palm oil is also cheap because it’s a productive crop and because oil palm trees demand less work and production inputs than other oil crops. For that reason, it is a popular cooking oil in Asian and African countries.

Where is Palm Oil Produced?

Oil palm trees are native to West Africa but were brought to Southeast Asia in the 19th century. Malaysia and Indonesia produce 87% of global palm oil. However, there are 42 other countries that also produce palm oil. That includes countries in West and Central Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central and tropical South America.[9]

Palm Oil Production

Oil palms are grown and harvested on large-, medium-, and small-scale palm oil plantations.[10] The palm oil industry is dominated by about a dozen corporations that operate large-scale plantations and mills.[11] The three largest players – Musim Mas, Wilma, and Sime Darby, account for 25% of palm oil production.[12] (While these are big multinationals, they are small in comparison to the biggest agribusiness corporations, the “ABCDs”, which are headquartered in western countries). There are at least a million small-scale oil palm producers in Indonesia alone.[13]

Oil palm trees grow up to 20 metres tall and have an average life span of 25 years. They start to bear fruit after three years and reach peak production between years 6-8. Fruit bunches can contain from 1-3,000 individual fruits, which are the size of small plums. The bunches weigh 10-25kg. Harvesting palm fruit is physically demanding. Harvesters use long steel poles with a sickle at the end to cut the palm fruit bunches down. The bunches are then loaded onto wheelbarrows and taken to collection points.

Like sugarcane, oil palm fruit has to be processed quickly after harvesting – within 24 hours. For this reason, palm oil refineries are usually situated within-country. 

Environment

Deforestation

Palm oil is a major driver of deforestation. For instance, approximately 55% of newly developed palm oil plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia from 1990-2005 resulted in deforestation.[14] As the palm oil industry expands, the space for new palm oil plantations is often made through deforestation and peatland clearing.

Palm oil is currently responsible for about 8% of deforestation – that’s a big chunk of the 53% of deforestation caused by agriculture. But keep in mind that 24% of deforestation is from land used for livestock, while 19% is coming from soybeans (which are mostly going to feed animals) and 11% from corn (same). So, if we are looking at changing one consumption practice to counter deforestation, palm oil isn’t the place to start.

And even in the big palm oil producing countries like Indonesia, land clearing for pulp, paper, and timber is a bigger source of deforestation.

However, the forests that are being cleared for palm oil plantations are in some cases particularly biodiverse or particularly efficient carbon sinks. Indonesian forests store even more carbon per hectare than the Brazilian Amazon. Some Indonesian forests are called “peatlands”, which are low-lying rainforests located close to coastal areas. The peat is under the forest, and it is basically a below-ground accumulation of decayed vegetation. It was formed in swampy conditions where plant material fails to fully decay and can build up to a depth of 10 metres or more over thousands of years.

The peat lands are an immense source of stored carbon. They can store up to 20 times as much carbon as tropical rainforests on normal mineral soils. As the forests above them are deforested, those sinks are released – making for something some have called a “carbon time-bomb”. Also, as the industry expands there is concern that its impact on deforestation could increase.

And palm oil could be less destructive. Deforestation could be reduced or avoided by planting in areas that are already deforested.

Biodiversity Loss

This problem is connected to the problem of deforestation and other land conversion for palm oil plantations.  Palm oil expansion could affect 54% of threatened mammals and 64% of threatened birds globally.

Some of the species threatened by palm oil expansion include the cotton top monkey, the chimpanzee, Sumatran tigers, African forest elephants, orangutans, gibbons, sun bears, kangaroos, and cassowaries. For example, 10,000 of the estimated 75-100,000 critically endangered Bornean orangutans are currently found in areas allocated to palm oil.

In addition to the loss of direct habitat, palm oil plantations can increase human-wildlife conflict with species like orangutans and tigers. Each year 750-1,250 orangutans are killed during human-orangutan conflicts, often linked to expanding agriculture.

A Jakarta-based ecologist has referred to palm oil plantations as “green deserts” because they are monocultures. While these are plants, palm plantations in Southeast Asia are an introduced species that does not interact very well with local ecology, so very little biodiversity exists within them.

Unfortunately, boycotting palm oil is likely to displace rather than halt biodiversity loss because it would increase the production of other oil crops. So the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and WWF prefer to push for palm oil sustainability, rather than a boycott or ban of palm oil.

Sustainable palm oil would involve putting an end to the clearing of native tropical forests for new palm oil plantations, and limit demand for palm oil for non-food uses. It would also ask existing palm oil plantations to manage their land responsibly by setting aside forest and other areas identified as important for biodiversity and carbon.

Climate Change

Oil palms are a very productive plant. One of the reasons it was produced initially was environmental sustainability: because palm oil is so productive, you need less land to grow it.

Source: WWF

The problem here is land conversion. Forests and peat lands are carbon sinks. When these lands are converted to palm oil plantations, it results in the release of greenhouse gases. As well, we lose those carbon sinks. Indonesia’s peatlands have gone from a carbon sink to a globally significant source of emissions thanks to deforestation. Oil palms do absorb carbon dioxide, but less effectively than forests.

Also, fire is used to clear lands for palm oil plantations, which emits GHG in addition to creating air pollution. 80% of the fires in Indonesia in 2019 were being set to clear land for palm oil plantations.

The challenging thing here is that oil palm production is more productive than substitute crops. And substitutes like coconut oil have their own environmental problems. We would likely have to convert even more land to keep up with demand.

Chemicals Use and Pollution

Palm oil plantations use a range of pesticides and herbicides, as well as large amounts of fertiliser. These products can pollute soil and groundwater. Although palm oil plantations aren’t large users of pesticides and fertilizers overall, these chemicals are often used indiscriminately – which can result in water pollution.

These chemicals also pose a risk to the people working on palm oil plantations. One herbicide used on palm oil plantations is paraquat dichloride. Paraquat is a highly toxic chemical, and for that reason is banned in the EU as well as several other countries. In Indonesia it is a restricted substance. Amnesty International found evidence of the use of paraquat on Indonesian plantations, as well as the absence of training and sufficient personal protective equipment. Workers described negative health effects after exposure to the chemicals. Palm oil mills also pollute, producing 2.5 metric tons of effluent for every metric ton of palm oil it produces.

People

Oil palms are one of the most profitable crops for farmers, which in part is a success story: palm oil has helped to reduce rural poverty in places like Indonesia, for example. Palm oil has the potential to improve incomes and employment where it is produced. Millions of smallholders rely on palm oil for their livelihoods in Malaysia and Indonesia.

On the other hand, the oil palm industry can sometimes hurt communities economically because they lose access to forests and it may not be compensated sufficiently by economic gains from cultivating oil palms.

Working Conditions

Amnesty International has reported on the labour abuses on palm oil plantations. Specifically, they looked at plantations in Indonesia linked to Wilmar, the largest processor and merchandiser of palm oils (they control 43% of the global palm oil trade).

On those plantations, Amnesty International found evidence of forced and child labour, gender discrimination, as well as exploitative and dangerous working conditions.

Amnesty concluded that these are not isolated incidents, but rather linked to the systemic business practices of Wilmar and its subsidiaries and suppliers, such as the low level of wages, use of targets and “piece rates” (workers are paid based on tasks completed rather than hours worked), and a complex system of financial and other penalties. Because of these systems, workers that do not meet their targets get their already low salaries deducted.

Targets are set by individual companies and “appear to be set arbitrarily to meet companies’ needs rather than being based on a realistic calculation of how much workers can do in their working hours.” Because of the targeting system, workers on the plantations get help from their spouses, children, and others to complete tasks. Amnesty documented evidence of the involvement of children in hazardous tasks, which is illegal under Indonesian law, on plantations owned by two Wilmar subsidiaries and three Wilmar suppliers. Some were as young as eight.

Amnesty found that workers, especially women, are employed under casual work arrangements which make them vulnerable to abuse. While most harvesters (always men) are employed on permanent employment contracts, most plant maintenance employees are women and are employed on a casual basis.

Employers can penalize workers for failing to meet targets or for mistakes in their work (e.g. picking unripe fruit). This penalty usually has a financial dimension. These penalties are not transparent, which allows employers to exact work under the threat of loss of pay or employment. Amnesty International has documented instances of this, which it considers to constitute forced labour. 

Indigenous Peoples and Nearby Communities

Indigenous peoples are losing their land to palm oil plantations. This is especially a problem in Indonesia. Land use rights in Indonesia are often disputed due to conflicts between customary land rights and formal property ownership.[15] Weak laws, poor government oversight, and the failure of palm producing companies to fulfil their human rights responsibilities have led to a loss of land and livelihood opportunities for Indigenous people in Indonesia, according to Human Rights Watch. Companies have failed to consult with Indigenous peoples and to provide just and fair compensation for losses suffered.

In some cases, Indigenous peoples are forcefully removed from their lands, which is one reason that the Rainforest Action Network has used the term “conflict palm oil” to describe the industry. Private armies and paramilitary groups are deployed sometimes, and community members have been killed in Indonesia. There are upwards of 600 ongoing land disputes between palm oil companies and rural communities.

Surrounding communities can also be made more at risk of flooding when palm plants are placed on steep slopes, causing soil erosion.

Food Security

Another problem with the conversion of agricultural lands for palm oil production is that it can hurt local food security (same with all cash crops).[16] And because palm oil is increasingly being used for biofuel, prices are increasing which can sometimes make it unaffordable for communities proximate to these plantations.[17]

Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

What is it?

The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is a sustainable palm oil certification that was founded in 2004. Like the Marine Stewardship Council, RSPO was founded through a collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund and Unilever, as well as Asian producers and a few other Western brands (e.g. Nestlé, Tesco, Cargill).[18] It has managed sustainability standards for palm oil production since 2008.[19] An estimated 14% of palm oil is RSPO certified.

The backbone of the RSPO standard is a generic set of Principles and Criteria adopted in 2005.[20] There are eight core Principles:

• Commitment to transparency,

• Compliance with applicable laws and regulations,

• Commitment to long-term economic and financial viability,

• Use of appropriate best practices by growers and millers,

• Environmental responsibility and conservation of natural resources and biodiversity,

• Responsible consideration of employees, smallholders, and other individual communities affected by growers and mills,

• Responsible development of new plantings, and

• Commitment to continuous improvement.[21]

Each of the eight principles has corresponding criteria, which can also differ from country-to-country and location-to-location.[22] RSPO creates standards for the growth of oil palms as well as the palm oil milling process.[23] It also has standards for tracing palm oil through the supply chain (which is called chain-of-custody certification).[24]

There are also separate standards for smallholder palm farmers. That was introduced a bit later than the main standard, and it responds to the challenges that small producers can have in obtaining sustainability certifications.[25] Basically, the idea is to ask smallholders to make improvements over time, rather than asking them to do everything before obtaining certification. That program was just introduced in 2019, so it isn’t clear how well it will work.

RSPO is the largest and by many accounts the most robust palm oil certification available, but it has still been widely criticized.

Criticisms

RSPO is a multi-stakeholder organization (meaning there are different voices involved in defining standards). The seven groups of stakeholders included in the RSPO’s general assembly are: palm oil growers, palm oil processors and/or traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, banks and investors, environmental and nature conservation NGOs, and social development NGOs.[26]

However, RSPO has been criticized for being industry-dominated and for failing to engage key vulnerable stakeholders, such as smallholding producers, labour unions, social and environmental groups, indigenous peoples and organizations, and women’s groups.[27]For instance, only a small proportion of palm oil-related land use conflicts are sufficiently acknowledged and resolved within RSPO’s institutional dispute resolution mechanisms.[28]

Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and other NGOs have criticized RSPO for the low stringency of compliance enforcement.[29] For instance, Amnesty International concluded that “the RSPO is acting as a shield which deflects greater scrutiny of Wilmar’s and other companies’ practices.”

Also, the majority of certified palm oil is mixed with conventional oil during transportation and as a result consumer products with the RSPO logo will most likely contain unsustainable palm oil.

Another argument is that the RSPO standard gives national governments an excuse to forego further public regulation of the industry.[30]

Critics also point to weaknesses in the standards themselves. RSPO initially avoided defining what sustainability means, going forward with the standard first.[31] RSPO’s emphasis on consensus decision-making, critics say, makes it incapable of dealing with contentious or controversial issues.[32] Even the moderate stringency of RSPO’s standards have led major stakeholders to leave.[33] 

Although RSPO has devoted some attention to the issue, it is still difficult for smallholder palm producers to afford certification.[34] And small- and medium-sized producers have less of an incentive to get RSPO certified because they often supply Indian, Chinese, and Pakistani markets[35]

Kristen mentioned a book chapter that looks at the role of auditors in sustainability labelling. The book is called Transnational Business Governance Interactions.

Why is Certification Uptake so Low?

Most sustainability labels deal with agricultural products for which there is a specific consumer product with a recognizable link to the agricultural product – e.g., coffee, paper, sugar, cocoa, fish.[36] That isn’t the case for palm oil.

That makes it much more difficult to get companies to sign onto voluntary standards for palm oil. Consumers mostly don’t know that there is palm oil in a product. Producers mostly don’t want to emphasize that there is palm oil in their items, since it has baggage and is not the major ingredient. That makes it more difficult to develop a price premium for certified palm oil. And that problem is compounded because even companies like Unilever that might use RSPO certified palm oil are not necessarily going to put the label on, say, their peanut butter because they want to emphasize the primary ingredients instead.

Another challenge is palm oil’s position in the market. Because it is mostly used as a cheap additive, producers mostly do not want to take on the increased cost and because there may not be much potential to charge a price premium. That problem is compounded because so much of the palm oil market is from non-wealthy countries, and there is very little consumer demand for sustainability labelling there.

Boycott v. Sustainability Certification

Palm oil mainly ubiquitous because it is cheap. And there are no real alternatives that wouldn’t cause problems. So:

What Can You Do?

Social and Environmental Labels

Assuming that you aren’t going to go palm oil-free: the RSPO is better than nothing, but it’s not great.

The WWF has a palm oil buyers scorecard where you can search brands for information about whether they are RSPO members or not (though again RSPO is flawed). It only has a few brands, though.

Rainforest Action Network recommends looking for the Palm Oil Innovation Group (POIG) standard, which they see as the only standard truly free of deforestation, peatland destruction, and exploitation. All POIG retailers and manufacturers are RSPO members, and must be certified – so it’s basically a stronger version of RSPO. POIG doesn’t have many certified products right now, but it might be the solution of the future. Some noteworthy POIG members include: Danone, L’Oréal, and Barry Callebaut. POIG NGOs include: WWF, Greenpeace, RAN, Verité (fair labour group), Sumatran Orangutan Society, and Orangutan Land Trust.

For workers’ rights, try the RSPO Smallholder Standard (although this might mean weaker sustainability standards). Another option is FairPalm.

Fairtrade hasn’t created standards for palm oil yet, but there is one available label that is substantively like fairtrade: FairPalm is a label for palm oil grown by smallholders in West Africa.

Or try doubling up with organic labels – which can at least address the harmful chemicals problem. Organic labels deal with the use of pesticides and fertilizers, so on their own they cannot address the other problems with palm oil. Unfortunately, RSPO is the best we have on that.

Ethical Consumer Worst and Best Ratings

Ethical Consumer has put together a list of brands to avoid (received their “worst” rating on palm oil use). Here are some of the brands that I recognized from that list:

• Nestlé – Kit Kat, NESCAFÉ, Perrier

• Mondelez – Cadbury

• Domino’s Pizza

• Yum! Brands – Pizza Hut, KFC

• Subway

• Itsu

• Prêt-à-manger

• TGI Friday’s

• Pizza Express

• L’Occitane

• Proctor and Gamble – Pampers, Head and Shoulders 

Ethical consumer also has a list of recommended brands (received their “best” rating on palm oil use). I only recognized a few brands from this list:

• Marks and Spencer

• Waitrose

• Lush

• Nivea

• Georganics

Get Involved!

Get involved with campaigns asking companies to implement sustainable palm oil practices. Write to companies to get them to use sustainable palm oil. Find out more about Michelle Desilets by following her on twitter.

Endnotes

[1] Ethical Consumer Podcast. (2018). Complex World of Palm Oil. Ethical Consumer.

[2] Paiement, Phillip. (2017). Transnational Sustainability Laws. New York: Cambridge University Press.

[3] The Food Chain Podcast. (2019). Can Palm Oil Be Sustainable? BBC World Service.

[4] Ethical Consumer Podcast, “Complex World of Palm Oil”.

[5] Ethical Consumer Podcast, “Complex World of Palm Oil”.

[6] Audio Long Reads. (2019). How the World Got Hooked on Palm Oil. The Guardian.

[7] Audio Long Reads, “How the World Got Hooked on Palm Oil.”

[8] Audio Long Reads, “How the World Got Hooked on Palm Oil.”

[9] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[10] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[11] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[12] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[13] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[14] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[15] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[16] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[17] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[18] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[19] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[20] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[21] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[22] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[23] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[24] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[25] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[26] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[27] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[28] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[29] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[30] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[31] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[32] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[33] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[34] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[35] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

[36] Paiement, Transnational Sustainability Laws.

Episode 24 - Wine

The wine market isn’t as concentrated as the beer market. The largest wine producer in the world, E&J Gallo, only has 2.7% of global production. Wine is made in at least fifty countries worldwide. The top five wine exporting countries are France (30% of wine exports), Italy (20%), Spain (9%), Australia (6%), and Chile (5%). All Canadian wine is produced by “small wineries” (wineries that sold less than 200,000 litres of wine)

Human Rights and the Wine Industry

South African Wine and Apartheid

A 2011 Human Rights Watch (HRW) Report, “Ripe with Abuse”, drew attention to human rights condition at South African wineries. A documentary called Bitter Grapes also examined this issue. South Africa’s legacy of apartheid has “continued to haunt the wine sector”.

Farm workers often live in substandard on-farm housing. In one case documented by HRW, a family was living in a converted pig stall with no electricity and water. The structure didn’t even provide shelter from weather. They had been living there for ten years. On-farm housing puts workers in really precarious positions, because when they are fired they lose not only their income but also their home. An estimated 930,000 workers were evicted from housing South African farms between 1994 and 2004. Although there are legal requirements around evicting farm workers, land owners frequently break those rules.

The work is usually seasonal and the pay is very low, especially for female farmworkers. At its extreme, some vineyards in South Africa were paying workers in alcohol rather than wages. Vineyard owners have been documented paying under South Africa’s minimum wages.

Working conditions are generally poor on these farms. Workers often don’t receive contracts or copies of their contracts. Part of the problem is the lack of labour inspectors: there are just over 100 labour inspectors for 6,000 farms and workplaces in the Western Cape. And labour inspectors give farms prior notice when they do inspect.

Farm workers face obstacles in unionizing, especially the fear of discrimination or being fired. For that reason, union density in the Western Cape agricultural sector is 3%, compared with 30% in South Africa’s formal sector as a whole. 2012 South Africa’s Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association launched an ethical seal for unfair labour practices.

Human Rights and Wine Elsewhere 

Although South Africa is most famous for human rights abuses on vineyards, it would be a mistake to assume that it is the only place where these problems persist. Agricultural work is among the most exploited industries.

Fairtrade Wine

One option if workers’ rights are a concern for you is to go for Fairtrade wine, if you’re buying from somewhere like South Africa, where labour protections might not be very strong. If you are looking for wine from South Africa, Argentina, Chile, or Lebanon, there are Fairtrade options available. In Canada, there are at least four wine brands that you can get with the Fairtrade seal. The United Kingdom appears to have a wider range of Fairtrade wine available.

Migrant Labour and Wineries

Canadian wineries rely on migrant labour (seasonal agricultural workers) to do a lot of the work on grape farms. That is common for wine produced in other wealthy countries.

So, the story of labour on Canadian wineries is in a very real sense the story of how we treat seasonal agricultural workers. On that metric, you might want to check out wine from Saskatchewan: it is the province that has done the best job of protecting the human rights of temporary foreign workers, according to a 2018 report by the Canadian Council for Refugees. TFWs there have access to healthcare with no waiting period – which isn’t the case for many provinces – and does a good job of legislating and enforcing worker protections. The federal government and the province of Newfoundland and Labrador fared the worst on this scorecard, with a C or D rating in every category except one (access to permanent residence was a B for Newfoundland, while enforcement of rules and regulations was a B for the federal government). Of the four major wine-producing provinces – Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, and Nova Scotia – British Columbia has the best protections according to the report (although it wasn’t great either, and there are barriers to accessing healthcare for seasonal agricultural workers). 

COVID-19 and Grape Farms

Farm owners are receiving $1,500 per worker to cover the costs of the required two-week quarantine. In BC, fruit farms rely heavily on backpackers to work during the harvest. They aren’t part of the temporary workers’ program, and it’s expected that this labour source won’t be available. The hope is to train a domestic workforce for the June harvest.

Environment and Wine

Pesticide Use on Vineyards

Grapes are disease- and pest-prone crops, so conventional grape farming uses large quantities of pesticides. Vineyards represent 3% of agricultural land in France, but 20% of phytosanitary volumes and 80% of fungicide use.

Some of those pesticides, including glyphosphate, have been identified as toxic or otherwise linked to adverse health consequences. In France, Valérie Murat launched a lawsuit in 2015 on behalf of her father, James-Bernard Murat, a vine grower who died from cancer. His death was officially recognized as being linked to his profession by the agricultural mutual society (MSA, la Mutuelle sociale agricole). Murat had sprayed three different pesticides containing the chemical sodium ar nite, which is now banned as a cancer-causing poison. Valérie wants his death recognized as manslaughter.

23 schoolchildren were hospitalized in Bordeaux in 2014 after a nearby vineyard sprayed a fungicide.Public attention to the issue of pesticide use in France has prompted some government actions. Glyphosphate is set to be banned by 2021. And the government is set to create no-spray zones to separate sprayed crops from people living and working nearby. One problem is that some winegrowers compensate for pesticide use with mechanization, which increases the carbon footprint of the operation.

Organic Wine

One option is to buy organic-certified wine. Organic agriculture doesn’t use pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides. Organic production doesn’t guarantee that an operation is environmentally-friendly on all metrics. For instance, organics rules may not govern water management. And it doesn’t take into account carbon footprints.

The LCBO is actually featuring organic wines right now.

Biodynamic Certification

Vineyards can also be certified as biodynamic farms. Biodynamic farming uses organic methods, but the standards are stricter and have things like biodiversity requirements. Biodynamic agriculture is similar to organic farming, but it also emphasizes some spiritual and mystical elements. It was created in the 1920s by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian “philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant.” The oldest biodynamic accreditation is the Demeter label. Kristen’s personal view: a little kooky, but mostly harmless.

Salmon-Safe Vineyard Certification

If you are buying wine from Oregon, Washington, or British Columbia, you can buy wine that is certified as Salmon-Safe. Basically, it means that the grapes were farmed according to standards that reduce vineyard run-off, protect water quality, and enhance biodiversity. As far as I could tell, it’s basically an add-on to organic or biodynamic certification

Climate Change

It has become an increasing point of discussion that organic =/= low-carbon. Some wineries are making commitments to reduce their carbon footprints. If climate change is the most important metric for you, you can look for wine with the Carbonzero certification.

Carbonzero is a carbon neutrality standard that requires emissions measurements and offsets (although carbon offsets are imperfect).

You can also get wine that is LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified. LEED is a certification operated by the Canada Green Building Council. It looks at things like water usage, energy efficiency, and sustainable site development. Stratus Vineyards was the first Canadian winery to obtain this standard, which it did in 2005.

Boxed versus Bottled

The most environmentally-friendly way to consume wine is to have it filled somewhere (en vrac method), but that option isn’t available most places – especially right now.

Bag-in-box wine is lighter than glass, so on carbon footprint you might be better off, especially if the wine has to travel a long way. Both glass and cardboard are recyclable, but the plastic bag and spout probably aren’t.

Tetra-paks have the carbon savings advantage of bag-in-box wine, but the drawback is that it’s made of a fusion of polyethylene, paper and aluminum. So you need special equipment to recycle them. As a result, the global recycling rate of Tetra Paks is 26%. And the recycling is actually downcycling, as compared with glass – where you pretty much get the same output from recycling.

Animal Welfare

We covered this in the vegetarianism episode, but you can go to Barnivore to find vegan alcohol options, including wine. Again, many wines aren’t vegan because they are clarified using fining agents that are made of casein (milk protein), albumin (egg whites), gelatine (animal protein), or isinglass (fish bladder protein). Fining agents can be vegan though, for instance activated charcoal and bentonite (clay). Many organic wines aren’t vegan, but some are.

Major Brands and Ethical Consumer’s Wine Guide

Barefoot Wines, the biggest selling wine in the world, is made by E&J Gallo Winery, scored relatively well on Ethical Consumer’s company rating. They scored an 11.5 out of 20, which is the top of the “amber” category (out of green, amber, and red).

E&J Gallo doesn’t report on environmental performance, doesn’t independently verify, and doesn’t have targets for improvement. So Ethical Consumer gave it their worst rating for environmental reporting. E&J Gallo also got a worst rating for supply chain management. This is because “It was considered to have a reasonable approach to discrimination, and forced and child labour, but did not mention freedom of association, living wages, or working hours. The company was considered to have a poor supply chain policy.”

On the other hand, Ethical Consumer recommends avoiding Constellation Brands products.

Episodes 22 and 23 - Seafood

The seafood industry is large, and growing, as humans are eating more fish each year. You might be surprised to learn that, per capita, annual fish consumption has increased from 9.9kg in the 1960s to 19.2kg in 2012. And the average Canadian eats slightly more than this, at 23.1kg. Americans eat an estimated 17 billion marine creatures annually.[1] 

Fishing is a Global Industry

In addition to capturing spectacular worldwide demand, fish is a global industry because it is a highly traded commodity: approximately 200 countries export fish and fishery products. Canadian fish and seafood imports generally match the global trend. The top five countries of origin for our fish and seafood imports are: the U.S. (36.7%), Thailand (14.9%), China (14.6%), Chile (5.1%) and Vietnam (4.6%).

The Fishing Supply Chain

1. Fish and shellfish (A) living in open waters or (B) raised via aquaculture in ponds, tanks or bounded coastal waters are harvested.  

2. They are packed and transported to processing facilities.

3. Processors convert the fish to consumer products (i.e. canned, frozen, filets, smoked). In some cases, processing takes multiple steps while in others fish are transported live.

4. Wholesalers receive the processed or unprocessed fish and distribute the product to retailers and restaurants.

5. You buy/eat it.

This episode focuses on just step one of the fish supply chain. Maybe we’ll cover the others in future episodes.

Overfishing

The State of Overfishing

85% of global fish stocks overfished. “Overfishing” refers to a situation when more fish are caught than can be replaced through natural reproduction. It has several causes, including rising demand, new technology, and governance gaps.

A study of catch data published in the journal Science in 2006 predicted that if fishing rates continue at the same rate, all the world's fisheries will have collapsed by 2048. The problem of overfishing is so bad that some have argued for giving the oceans their own seat at the United Nations.  The global ocean plays a central role in supporting life on Earth. Oceans cover 3/4 of the planet and contain 80% of all life.

Overfishing affects the entire ocean ecosystem. But especially the top of the food chain: the population of large predatory fish has dropped by an estimated 90% since the industrialization of fisheries in the 1950s.

Overfishing is bad for workers as well as the environment: because fish stocks have been declining, vessels must take longer and longer voyages to find fish, meaning that workers are stuck aboard for long periods of time; declining stocks also make fish processing an increasingly precarious job.

You might recall the collapse of the Newfoundland Grand Banks cod fishery in the 1990s: this put between 50 000 and 40 000 people out of work. Fishing is central to the livelihood and food security of an estimated 200 million people. Sustainable fishing matters for the environment, for animals, and for people.

Illegal, Unregulated, and Unreported Fishing

The problem of forced labour on fishing vessels is extremely difficult to tackle, as it is linked to illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing (IUU fishing also goes hand in hand with overfishing).  

Because international waters are a global commons, regulating fishing has proven extremely difficult. For this reason, people often refer to overfishing as a tragedy of the commons (each individual has an incentive to overfish, even if collectively everyone would benefit from responsible stewardship).

IUU fishing is a huge problem: it is estimated that IUU fishing accounts for 30% of all fishing activity worldwide.  Structural loopholes in international maritime law, specifically on the high seas, allow for IUU fishing to proliferate.

Outside of a country’s exclusive economic zone (on the “high seas”, which cover 64% of the surface area of the ocean) ships are governed by the laws of the country in which that vessel is registered (the “flag country”).

Often, fishing vessels are registered in countries with no meaningful link to their operations. IUU fishing occurs in primarily on the high seas and poorly regulated national waters. For example, along the coastline of sub-Saharan Africa forced labour is a problem on European and Asian fishing vessels in poorly regulated waters.

Seafood Fraud

A recent investigation of seafood bought in Montreal found that more than half of samples were mislabelled. 61% were mislabelled in some way, while 34% were an entirely different species than advertised.

Unfortunately, this is not an outlier. It merely highlights the endemic challenge of falsely and mislabeled seafood. Between 25 and 70 percent of seafood products in Canada are “mislabeled due to counterfeiting somewhere along the supply chain”. Globally, on average 30 percent of seafood products are mislabeled.

Why so high? As fish markets have globalized so too have the supply chains for fish products, resulting in a “notoriously opaque” system in which weak governance provides a hospitable environment for seafood fraud. Also, consumers don’t really know much about seafood – which is a very wide category. Approximately 350 species of seafood can be found in American markets.[2] So, seafood fraud is very easy.

Common frauds:

·      In Canada, cod is often actually haddock[3]

·      One investigation found that three quarters of red snapper was actually another species – most commonly red sea bream or tilapia.[4]

·      Grouper is another seafood that will be mislabelled. It’s often actually catfish[5]

·      And fish labelled as wild caught is often actually farmed[6]

Beyond being a consumer rights issue – if you buy salmon you probably want to know that you are receiving salmon – seafood mislabeling poses challenges for sustainability.

Eco-labels with traceability standards offer a partial solution to this problem, although seafood mislabeling still happens under such schemes (but it happens a lot less). Of course, private regulation has its limits – accordingly, government-mandated traceability requirements will play an important role as well. (For a good summary of traceability standards in the seafood industry, see this report.)

Finally, better tools are needed. DNA testing has generated research attention since it poses a potential solution to the deficiencies of current traceability best practices. For instance, the MSC published a report on the subject in March. 

The Ecological Effects of Fishing

In addition to overfishing, sustainability also concerns the broader environmental impact of fishing processes. For example, if gear is lost during the fishing process or if fishing entails destructive processes, such as the use of dynamite and poisons, this can cause more widespread ecosystem damage.

Commercial fishing gear is becoming more efficient and less efficient, depending on how you look at it. Modern fishing devices are great at finding and catching fish. But they damage the seabed and catch a lot of unwanted species in the process. “Bycatch” refers to marine species captured in a fishing operation that aren’t the target species. Bycatch is usually thrown overboard, dead or dying.

The bycatch ratio varies dramatically from method to method, but in general about a quarter of all fish taken worldwide is bycatch.[7] Sometimes, as is the case for shrimp trawling, there is much more bycatch collected than the actual intended catch.[8] In Thailand’s shrimp industry, the bycatch ratio is 14:1.[9] Dredges, bottom trawls, and drift nets are the worst for bycatch and habitat destruction – well, also dynamite.

Bottom Trawling

Bottom trawling basically turns the bottom of the sea into something resembling a paved surface or plowed field.[10] This causes extensive and irreparable damage to coral reefs and seabed ecosystems.[11] It also stirs up sediment that makes the area unlivable for some species.[12] Bottom trawling is the “marine equivalent of clear-cutting a rain forest.”[13] The average trawling operation throws 80-90 percent of the sea animals that it captures as bycatch overboard.[14] “Imagine using a bulldozer to catch songbirds for food – that’s what it’s like.” (biologist Sylvia Earle)[15]

Dolphin-Safe

Dolphin safe: in 1987 a biologist filmed dolphins being drowned in purse seine nets for tuna fishing. The footage of dolphins shrieking as the nylon nets tore away their fins really affected people, and tuna consumption dropped almost overnight. “Dolphin-safe” tuna was maybe the first ethical seafood consumer movement

Aquaculture

As overfishing impacts more and more species, fish farming is on the rise. For instance, if you are eating Atlantic salmon it is almost certainly from a fish farm: 300 farmed salmon are sold for every wild caught salmon.[16] Fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world. In 1970 it contributed 3% of the world’s seafood, compared to more than 50% today.[17] And the weight of farmed fish exceeds the weight of beef produced globally.[18]

Here’s a description of aquaculture that I found helpful: “In the fjords and coastal inlets along the coast of Norway, Britain, Iceland, Chile, China, Japan, Canada, the United States, and many other countries, cages or nets that may be more than 200 feet long and 40 feet deep have been lowered into the sea and secured to platforms from which workers feed the fish. With salmon, 50,000 fish may be confined to each sea cage, at a stocking density that is equivalent to putting each 30-inch salmon in a bathtub of water.”[19]

 Fish farming is problematic for a bunch of reasons. First, because of the intensity of farming it is not great from an animal welfare perspective. More on this in a bit.

The second problem with farmed fish is that fish farms require lots of fish feed: “Fish farming sounds like a good way of meeting the growing demand for seafood while taking pressure off wild fisheries. But that can be like thinking that if we ate more beef, we wouldn’t need to grow so much corn.”[20] What often happens is that carnivorous fish are farmed and fed high volumes of fish meal. So, in essence, these operations actually use up a lot more fish flesh than they produce – and that means putting more pressure on wild fish populations.[21] And if you’re thinking, hey, at least fish meal is from relatively abundant fish, remember that this is taking away the food supply from vulnerable apex predator populations.

Fish farming also isn’t very carbon efficient for that reason. Whereas a wild salmon will go and catch its own food, fish farmers need to get fish meal from fossil-fuel powered boats.[22]

Fish farming can also cause harm to the wider environment through the spread of farm waste, chemicals, disease and parasites.  

Basically, high concentrations of fish feces and food waste are discharged, untreated, into the water around sea cages. According to WWF calculations, Scottish salmon farms discharge the same amount of waste as 9 million people (double the human population of Scotland).[23] 

The pollution from fish farming can also affect the people that inhabit coastal areas. For instance, in 1996 activists in India won a class action lawsuit against shrimp farms, on the basis that these farms had cost local communities their livelihoods.[24] In Bangladesh, illegal shrimp farms have displaced thousands of local villagers.[25]

And as with factory farming on land, the intensity of fish feedlots means that fish need to be given antibiotics and pesticides. Those leach into the water and cause environmental problems like ocean dead zones.

Lastly, farmed fish sometimes escape when predators or storms cause holes in the enclosure nets. As many as half a million farmed salmon escape every year, for example.[26] These escapees can infect wild fish with diseases and parasites. For example, young wild salmon now have levels of sea lice infestation 73% times higher than previously.[27]

Some kinds of aquaculture operations are better than others. Oyster and mussel farming seems to be relatively benign.

On the other hand, shrimp farming is a major contributor to the destruction of mangrove forests, in addition to all the regular harms.

Animal Welfare

As was the case for the vegetarianism episode, there are sort of two issues here. The first is whether it is ever okay to eat a living being that feels pain. The second is whether the manner of catching or farming fish is justified on welfare grounds.

Because we’ve covered the first bit before, we’ll skip over it here. Check out part one of vegetarianism for this. I will just quickly say that seafood encapsulates a wide variety of animals, with different capacities and levels of intelligence. Some fish – like octopus – are incredibly intelligent. Most are social creatures that have demonstrated pain responses in scientific studies.

The one exception to this may be bivalves. Bivalves are a class of marine and freshwater molluscs that have laterally compressed bodies enclosed by a shell consisting of two hinged parts. They include species like oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops. The evidence for consciousness in bivalves is “barely stronger than it is for plants, which is to say it is vanishingly slight.”[28]

A Good Death? Not So Much

Wild caught fish is somewhat proximate to hunted meat. The fish live normal lives for their species, so the only question is whether the slaughter is unjustifiably cruel. There is no such thing as humane slaughter for wild-caught fish. Take longline fishing, for example. When fish are hooked, they struggle for hours trying to escape. Then they are either clubbed to death or have their gills cut and bleed to death.

In trawlers, hundreds of different species are crushed together, gashed on corals, bashed on rocks – for hours – and then hauled from the water, causing painful decompression (the decompression sometimes causes the animals’ eyes to pop out or their internal organs to come out their mouths). On longlines, too, the deaths animals face are generally slow. Some are simply held there and die only when removed from the lines. Some die from the injury caused by the hook in their mouths or by trying to get away. Some are unable to escape attack by predators […] no fish gets a good death. Not a single one. You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.[29]

Also, your wild caught fish probably came with bycatch.

Fish Farming

Farmed fish are similar to factory farmed cows, chickens, and pigs. They are in very crowded environments. Farmed fish exhibit stress behaviours just like factory farmed mammals and birds.[30]

Eating Animals identifies six sources of suffering on salmon farms: “(1) water so fouled that it makes it hard to breathe; (2) crowding so intense that animals begin to cannibalize one another; (3) handling so invasive that physiological measures of stress are evident a day later; (4) disturbance by farmworkers and wild animals; (5) nutritional deficiencies that weaken the immune system; and (6) the inability to form a stable social hierarchy, resulting in more cannibalization.”[31]

Also like factory farming on land, farmed fish have a high death rate due to illness, abrasions, and sea lice infestations – which Lex so helpfully told us about in the food episode. A recent study found that salmon bred and raised at fish factory farms are forced to grow at such an accelerated rate that over 50% of them are going deaf. Cool. “Another study by Royal Society Open Science found that a significant proportion of farmed salmon suffer from severe depression. The fish are referred to as ‘drop outs’ because they float lifelessly in the dirty tanks they reside in.” (source: Live Kindly)

Farmed fish are typically starved for 7-10 days before slaughter.[32] Because there generally aren’t rules for the humane slaughter of fish, farmed fish are killed in brutal ways that would be illegal in land operations.[33] Sometimes they are simply allowed to suffocate on land, which can take 15 minutes.[34] They are sometimes bashed in the head with a wooden bat, which sometimes doesn’t kill them – meaning that they can be cut open while fully conscious.[35] Sometimes they have their gills cut and bleed to death.[36]

Bivalve Farming

The one type of fish farming that may be ethically justifiable is the farming of bivalves like mussels and oysters. Because these creatures likely don’t feel pain and aren’t conscious, the same cruelty concerns don’t apply. Also, bivalves feed themselves and actually clean up the water around them – theoretically getting around some of the environmental issues.

Generally speaking, “mom and pop” mussel and oyster farms seem to be fine – good, even – for the environment. However, there are some arguments that mussel and oyster farms at a large scale can have negative environmental effects. So, it’s still unclear whether they’re a good idea at an industrial scale.

Human Rights

Thailand is the third largest exporter of seafood in the world (the country’s seafood industry is worth $7.3 billion USD annually); it is also notorious for crewing fishing boats with slaves trafficked from Burma and Cambodia. A form of bonded labour is typical: in this scenario, trafficked fishermen are sold to fishing boat owners and then must work to pay off a given price (the ka hua). In addition to being enslaved, workers on such ships are exposed to overwork, violence, torture, and even executions at sea.

Each year the U.S. State Department produces its Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report. In 2014, that report downgraded Thailand to a Tier 3 ranking due to a lack of improvements. The report revealed that the Thai government ignored instances of human trafficking and even sought to punish those attempting to bring these abuses to light.

Thailand is often used as an example of human trafficking in the fishing industry because of the size of its fishing industry and inaction on the part of its government (regulation of the Thai fishing industry is woefully inadequate). Nonetheless, this is a problem that exists worldwide. While Southeast Asia is the biggest problem region for slavery on fishing vessels, this is a global phenomenon. Human trafficking is endemic in the fishing industry. Some fishing operations in at least 51 countries crew their ships with slave labour. 

Sustainability Labels

Marine Stewardship Council

When purchasing sustainable seafood there may be several different eco-labels available to you, but the one that is largest and most well-known is the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). MSC was founded in 1996 by WWF and Unilever.

The MSC’s standards are based on three principles:

1. The condition of the fish populations: are there enough fish to ensure that the fishery is sustainable?

2. The impact of the fishery on the marine environment: what effect is the fishery having on the immediate marine environment, including non-target fish, marine mammals, and seabirds?

3. The fishery management systems: the rules and procedures that are necessary to meet principles one and two.[37]

The MSC now accounts for about 10% of global wild caught seafood (as compared to aquaculture/farmed fish) but this proportion is often much higher in developed countries, where the demand for certified fish is higher. In Canada, for example, 67% of domestic wild catch seafood is MSC certified.

In addition to being the most widely used eco-label, MSC is also well-known for its rigorous standards. However, it has been criticized for focusing too narrowly on the sustainability of fish stocks instead of the overall environmental impact of fisheries and the fish supply chain, as well as for having a process that is too burdensome for small fisheries and fisheries in developing countries.

If you are looking for sustainably caught seafood, the MSC is probably your best bet: it is the most likely to actually be available in stores near you and has standards that are reasonably stringent and evaluated impartially, based on evidence.

Aquaculture Stewardship Council

The Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) was founded in 2010, also with the involvement of WWF. ASC standards focus primarily on environmental issues, like pollution reduction and protections for biodiversity. There are also a few social standards – no child or forced labour, safe working environments, consulting Indigenous communities, and regulated working hours – in ASC. There are no animal welfare standards as far as I was able to tell.

SeaChoice reviewed ASC and MSC certifications in Canada. They found some weaknesses with MSC, but bigger ones with ASC – lots of evidence of non-compliance with the standards.

What to Think About When Choosing Ethical Seafood

For my own part, I believe that seafood is largely not an ethically justified dietary choice. I would only consider eating bivalves, and in that case only if the method of farming/fishing is sustainable and environmentally responsible.

However, for those that want to cast a wider ethical net, here is what you should think about:

Species

Is it overfished or not? There’s a fairly long list of seafood species you should never eat because they are overfished. But some of the more well-known ones include: bluefin tuna, Atlantic cod, Chilean sea bass, shark, Atlantic halibut, and monkfish.[38]  You can usually feel comfortable that a few seafood species aren’t overfished. Those include: oysters, mussels, sardines, Pacific halibut, herring, jellyfish, mullet, and pickerel.[39]

What is its trophic level? Is it an apex predator? Bottomfeeder recommends eating only bottom-of-the-foodchain species, because the big fish are so overfished.[40]

Does it feel pain/how intelligent is it?

Fishing or farming method

Things you might want to ask yourself about the fishing or farming method include:

• How much bycatch is produced?

• Does it kill coral or otherwise destroy ecosystems? How polluting is it?

• How cruel is this method?

The best catch methods from a sustainability perspective are hook and line fishing, harpoons and scuba, pots and traps, and purse seines.[41] Always avoid seafood caught with drift nets (“walls of death”), dynamite and cyanide, and bottom trawls.[42]

Location

Location matters too. Try asking:

• How far does the seafood have to travel to get to me?

• How did it travel? (e.g. really pricey fish by air freight have a large carbon footprint)

Brands/Certifications

To try to push the market you can ask: is the company that sold it a seafood leader or laggard? You can also look for seafood with MSC or ASC certification. And if there isn’t a certification, ask yourself: do you really know anything about where the seafood came from?

How to Choose Ethical Seafood

If you are going to be a selective omnivore, Taras Grescoe’s Bottomfeeder offers a generally good rule of thumb for seafood: eat as close to the bottom of the food chain as possible.[43]

Bottomfeeder also recommends:[44]

• Avoiding cheap seafood, since it was probably farmed

• Avoiding fish that has travelled far

• Avoiding long-lived predator fish (e.g. Chilean sea bass, sharks, tuna, swordfish)

• Avoiding farmed shrimp, tuna, salmon, and any other carnivorous fish

• If buying farmed salmon, cod, or trout, opt for organically farmed ones (the book was written before ASC was created)

• Opt for seafood at the lower end of the food chain as much as possible

In addition, there are a few useful tools that can help you pick ethical seafood:

• SeaChoice is a good place to go to get informed about sustainable seafood.

• Oceanwise classified seafood as recommended or not recommended. The full list is a bit overwhelming, but you can also search the website pretty easily. SeaChoice ranked this as the best resource for choosing ethical seafood.

• Seafood Watch has a useful website that you can use to search species that are “best choice”, “good alternatives”, or “avoid”.

Endnotes

[1] Singer, Peter and Mason, Jim. (2006). The Ethics of What We Eat. Rodale Publishers.

[2] Grescoe, Taras. (2008). Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins.

[3] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[4] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[5] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[6] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[7] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[8] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[9] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[10] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[11] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[12] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[13] Safran Foer, Jonathan. (2009). Eating Animals. New York: Back Bay Books at p.191.

[14] Safran Foer, Eating Animals.

[15] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder at p.27.

[16] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[17] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[18] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[19] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat page 122.

[20] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat page 123.

[21] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[22] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[23] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[24] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[25] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[26] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat page 122.

[27] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[28] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat at page 133.

[29] Safran Foer, Eating Animals at p. 192-3.

[30] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[31] Safran Foer, Eating Animals at p.190

[32] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[33] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[34] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[35] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[36] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[37] Singer and Mason, The Ethics of What We Eat.

[38] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[39] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[40] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[41] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[42] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[43] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

[44] Grescoe, Bottomfeeder.

Episode 19 - Personal Behaviour Changes and the Climate Crisis

This episode we were joined by Robert Miller, a progressive activist and organizer based out of Edmonton, Alberta. One of the groups he works with is Extinction Rebellion. Since this was an interview episode, a research note is a bit tricky to do. So, what I’ve done here is just include the prep notes that I did, to give a sense of themes.

Belief and the Climate Crisis 

Johnathan Safran Foer in We Are the Weather writes about the psychological difficulty that humans experience in truly believing climate science. What he means by that is that many of us know the climate science, but we don’t really believe it – not enough to really change the way that we live in the ways that the climate crisis demands.

One of the threads throughout the book is this question that he raises around his grandmother’s decision to leave her village when the Holocaust was beginning. And the decision of family members who stayed. All of them had access to the same knowledge, but there is something different going on when it comes to really believing it and acting on that belief.

And we see this a lot with the climate crisis, I think: this idea that we are in the middle of the greatest crisis that humankind has ever faced, that we know we have a decade to take radical leaps to prevent runaway climate change.

And yet my life goes on more or less as normal. And I think that’s the way it is for a lot of people. So, I guess my question is: how can we get people to really believe in climate change, in the deep-seated way that we needed to?

Climate Anxiety and Climate Grief

One idea is that we can’t really conceptualize the climate crisis until we acknowledge its ability to kill us. That’s a pretty heavy thing to accept.

Do you experience climate anxiety? How do you deal with it?

Of course, the other side of climate anxiety is climate grief – coping with what we’ve already lost and what we cannot save. I think for me at least, climate grief is harder to cope with than climate anxiety.

What would you say to people that are just starting to confront climate grief, or to even realize that climate grief is a thing?

Which Personal Behaviour Changes Are Best?

Nearly two-thirds of global emissions are linked to direct and indirect forms of human consumption. So, in theory at least, there’s a lot that we can personally do to address the climate crisis.

What, in your view, is the single most important personal behaviour change people can make to address the climate crisis?

Eating a plant-based diet

We’ve talked on the podcast before about the environmental benefits of eating a plant-based diet – whether that means going fully vegan or becoming a ‘flexitarian’ or ‘reducetarian’. By one suggestion, a climate-sensitive flexitarian diet would mean eating about 1.5oz of meat daily (or, about three hamburgers worth per week). And just a reminder from our previous episodes that the world is an animal farm – about 30% of the earth’s land mass is used for animal agriculture or animal feed. Emissions from food production could surge by 87% by 2050.

Robert, you’ve been vegan for a while. Was it the climate crisis that motivated you to become vegan, or something else? What advice would you give to someone who cares about the climate, but who is intimidated about the prospect of going vegetarian or vegan?

I just want to quickly highlight some of the other personal behaviour changes that are often recommended:

Reducing your food waste

GHG emissions associated with food loss and waste is as much as 8-10% of all global emissions.

Composting

By the time this episode comes out, we’ll have already released the zero-waste episode. In that episode we talked about how organic waste is the majority of garbage people throw away. Composting can help us fight climate change because landfilled organic materials produce methane, a super potent GHG.

In an episode on biogas, we talk about the potential for turning food waste into energy!

Driving less, cycling, walking, and taking public transit more

In 2010, the transport sector was responsible for over 25% of global energy demand.

Having kids?

There is one last lifestyle change that I want us to reflect on a bit, and that is having children. A lot of people worry about bringing children into a world that is quite likely going to look a lot worse in a generation than it does today. Others have concerns that producing more humans contributes to the increases in consumption that are causing the climate crisis. What are your thoughts on becoming a parent in the climate change era?

What’s wrong with fighting the climate crisis with personal behaviour changes?

Some articles say that lifestyle changes are the only answer to the climate crisis, while others say that we can’t address climate change through personal behaviour. So, who’s right?

Themes within this: inefficiency (there’s so much we cannot personally control); personal behaviour changes are way easier for some than others; and climate justice, environmental racism.

Do We Need Mandatory Rationing?

A lot of people have used wartime rationing as an example for how personal behaviour can address the climate crisis. For instance, Bill McKibben has said, “it’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. And we are losing.” The suggestions along this line usually include stuff like marshaling extraordinary public investment to build solar panels, wind farms, electrified public transit, tree-planting et cetera. It could also include meat rations and, more controversially, retreat and re-wilding.

What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of taking a wartime approach to the climate?

As we get closer to 2030, are we running out of other options?

The Green New Deal

One thing that I’ve started to hear a lot in climate discussions is how we need to focus on the opportunities of decarbonization as well as the costs. We often hear this in the context of the Green New Deal.

What is the Green New Deal, in a nutshell? What are some of the benefits that we could achieve from acting collectively on the climate crisis, aside from averting catastrophe?

Learn more about the Green New Deal for Canada.

How to Promote Collective Action Changes

Political scientists love to talk about climate change as a collective action problem. Basically what that means is that the benefits of addressing climate change are diffuse (and mostly in the future), while the costs are specific (and mostly in the present). So, there are huge incentives to free ride, which makes collective action difficult. Or, to put it in the slightly flashier language of journalist Oliver Burkeman: “If a cabal of evil psychologists had gathered in a secret undersea base to concoct a crisis humanity would be hopelessly ill-equipped to address, they couldn’t have done better than climate change”.

We hear this narrative a lot in Canada from climate delayers: that Canada is a small part of the world’s global emissions and we can’t take on climate change, so why bother. What would you say to that?And what about the idea that the world still needs oil, so someone has to supply it? What does collective action on climate look like, from your perspective?

How Can You Support Collective Action?

Vote!

Vote for the candidate that has the best climate stance. If you live in America, the Sunrise Movement identifies Green New Deal champions. What should someone do if they don’t see sufficient climate policies reflected in any of their major parties or candidates?

Sign petitions, write your MP, your MPP, your councillor

Petitions are helpful for advocacy groups, because it helps them talk to politicians. When an advocacy group meets with an MP, it’s a lot easier to get his attention when you can show that people in the constituency care about that issue. The Citizens’ Climate Lobby has good tools for talking about the climate crisis.

Go to climate rallies

Protests make issues visible, and crowd-size matters. Activists often talk about the idea that non-violent revolutions have, historically, usually been successful when they mobilize 3.5% of the population. (From Erica Chenoweth’s research). In September 2019, roughly that percentage of Canadians participated in the climate strike. Do you think anything has changed as a result of recent climate strikes? And if not, why not?

Donate to or volunteer with a climate group of a climate champion candidate

There is a lot you can do with your time as a climate action volunteer: door-knocking, calling, pamphleting, flyering, postering, et cetera. Let’s say a listener is interested in helping out, but showing up at protests isn’t something they’re comfortable with. What would you say to them? What are some helpful ways they could get involved?

Become a citizen climate scientist

If science is your jam, there are ways to get involved as a citizen scientist.

Bring up climate change in your social circles, even if it’s awkward

This is where I think personal behaviour can spur social change, too. Any tips on how to raise the climate crisis with climate agnostics in a way that won’t alienate them.

Personal Behaviour Changes ARE Collective Action Changes

That is why acting matters, even if it is small. Because “the most contagious standards are the ones that we model” (JSF). So be the person at the protest, even if there are only a few hundred people there – even if there are only a dozen people there. Try to reduce your carbon footprint. Go flexitarian, or reducetarian, or vegetarian, or vegan. The people who love you will notice. And when they change, even just a little, it matters.

Also mentioned in the episode:

Wet’suwet’en Solidarity
350.org
Fridays For Future Climate Strikes

Episode 17 - Zero Waste

The Disposable Society

Zero waste, or waste-free, is a reaction to the throwaway society and all of the problems that it has caused. The disposable society, throwaway society or throwaway culture are terms used to describe the overconsumption of short-lived or disposable items over durable goods that can be repaired.

Short-lived or low-quality items include things like fast fashion, as well as planned obsolescence and e-waste. Making things that don’t last very long is a viable business strategy because consumers then need to buy replacements. It is profitable because businesses aren’t held responsible for their product’s end of life. Next, there are also single-use items like plates, cutlery, straws, and bags. And of course there is also the packaging for all of these goods.

Disposable, or single-use, items are actually a pretty new invention. When disposables were introduced in the 1950s, they were touted as a timesaver for housewives.  Around that same time, plastic was introduced into the mainstream market.

A few plastic facts:

●      It has only been 113 years since plastic was first introduced.[1]

●      It has only been 55 years since the first plastic bag was created.[2]

●      We have produced over 320 million metric tonnes of plastic, which is heavier than every human alive combined.[3] And that figure is set to double by 2040.[4]

●      Only 14% of plastic has ever been collected for recycling, and only 5% has actually been recycled (rather than downcycled).[5]

Today, plastic has become so essential to how we live our lives that it has really gotten out of control. Globally, we generate 3.5 million tons of solid waste every day – approximately 10x the amount we produced a century ago. The average American produces 1,500 pounds of trash annually, sending 4.4 pounds of trash to the landfill every day.[6] And that is a problem for climate change because landfills are responsible for 16% of methane emissions in the US.[7]

Single-use plastics are a particular problem because they are so common and used for such a small amount of time. For instance, Coca-Cola produces 120 billion plastic bottles every year.[8] And plastic bags are used for an average of just 15 minutes.[9]

As William McCallum of Greenpeace UK has described it:

…we managed to create a material and use it at unbelievable scale with no plan for how to deal with it afterwards. Single-use plastic cutlery, plastic bags, and plastic-lined coffee cups have become central to our lives – used once for a matter of minutes, they will not break down for hundreds of years. It is untenable to carry on like this: we are consigning future generations to a world in which plastic might outweigh fish in the ocean in 2050.[10]

Most plastic ends up in landfill, but a lot of it also leaks into our water systems, ending up in the oceans. 12.7 million tons of plastic enter the oceans every year,[11] which works out to one garbage truck of plastic entering the ocean every minute.[12] There are an estimated 150 million tons of plastic in the oceans right now, equivalent to 300 of the Burj Khalifa, the tallest tower in the world.[13]

When plastic gets into the oceans, it really messes with ecosystems. Approximately 90% of seabirds have plastic in their stomachs.[14] And plastic ingestion and entanglement are really bad for seabirds and other wildlife. And because plastic is being eaten by everything and everyone, bioaccumulation is a risk for animals at the top of the food chain[15]

The Zero Waste Movement

The Zero Waste, No Waste, or Waste-free movement is essentially 25 years old. Most of the top advocates for zero-waste are (white) millennial women. Some examples include: Kathryn Kellogg (Going Zero Waste), Lauren Singer (Trash is for Tossers and Package Free Shop), Anne-Marie Bonneau (Zero-Waste Chef), and Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home).

Principles of Zero Waste

In its simplest expression, the zero-waste movement aims to produce zero trash. But even the most ardent waste-free advocate will acknowledge that this is not possible in today’s society. We will always produce some trash, and we will always be complicit in the production of trash we can’t see.

This is why any zero-waste advocate will tell you that part of being zero-waste is making your voice heard – whether that’s political actions like voting, protesting, and talking to your Member of Parliament or smaller actions like writing a makeup company to say that you’ve stopped buying their product because there aren’t refillable options. 

Although recycling is a part of the waste-free movement, going zero-waste actually means recycling less. So, zero waste means reduce, reuse, recycle, and compost, in order of preference.[16]

Reduce

You can reduce by refusing to buy things with lots of packaging and by not buying things unless you really need them. This doesn’t necessarily mean being super austere: it means finding a balance of what you need. A 2015 survey found that more than half of Americans (54%) are overwhelmed with the amount of clutter that they have. Three-quarters (78%) said they did not know what to do with it or found it too complicated to deal with.

Reuse

Go for reusable items instead of single-use items, and durable instead of short-term. Then keep using stuff as long as you can. That means repairing stuff – and when you’re buying, look for things that can be repaired. Also, shop used when you can. And when something can no longer be used for its original purpose, repurpose it. Waste-free advocates often talk about “demoting” items. For example, the last plastic toothbrush I owned I demoted as a cleaning brush. It’s great for cleaning tiles. Basically, be like your grandparents.

Recycle

Recycle, where you can, but do it well: if more than 1% of a batch of recycling is contaminated, the entire thing may end up in landfill.[17] Zero-waste asks you to really look into what you’re recycling.

Compost

About 75-80% of all household trash is organic matter that can be composted, but we mostly aren’t composting it. If your city or town does composting, it can be really easy to do this. I keep a compost bin in my kitchen (food waste) and in my bathroom (for things like tissue, hair, and compostable floss). In a later episode on biogas, we talk about how food waste could be converted into energy, if you want to learn more!

Generally speaking, compostable plastics are not a solution to plastic waste. Very little of it actually gets composted. And in a lot of cases you cannot compost these items in home composting. There are also “biodegradable” plastics that can’t be composted. And nothing biodegrades in a landfill!

How to Become Zero Waste (ish)

Ultimately, going zero-waste will mean replacing some of the tools that you use to meet your daily needs. But it’s counterproductive to trash stuff that you’re currently using in favour of eco-friendly products, so waste-free advocates suggest a slow approach with small improvements.

Start with a waste audit

Go through your trash to see what some of the most impactful swaps could be for you. For me it is definitely snack foods – chips, granola bars – and receipts (which cannot be recycled or composted). 

Say no to stuff you don’t want

As Sarah Lewis of the Zero Waster puts it: “Just Say No to Crap”. This can include things like straws and paper cups. Being clear about your requests in advance is a good way to avoid problems. One easy solution is to put a “no junk mail” sign on your mailbox. When you are at a restaurant or café, be clear and polite but firm about your requests. Usually people are happy to accommodate, but if they aren’t you can choose not to return there in the future.

Gifts are difficult, because there are social customs and emotions involved. Zero-waste advocates generally recommend: (1) talking to your family and friends about why waste-free is important to you and (2) giving them tools to make it easy for them to give gifts that won’t cause problems for you.  Kathryn Kellogg recommends giving friends and family a list of consumables, experiences, and items you’d really value. It is key to do it well in advance. She even recommends adding notes about why you want something, which can help if people want to go off-list.[18] But ultimately, this is a thing you’re doing: if someone gives you a gift, accept it and thank them. The time to raise the issue is much, much later.

Buy things more intentionally

This means buying things only when you really need them. When you do buy something, try to find ways to buy it used or buy it new but built to last (repairable). Try waiting 30 days before purchasing something you want.

Start with some easy waste-free moves

Some of the easiest ways to reduce your waste include:

·      Saying no to straws (unless you need single-use straws for accessibility reasons);

·      Getting (and actually using) reusable bags. Set up a system so that they are with you when you need them; and

·      Getting (and actually using) a reusable water bottle and coffee mug.

When you’re ready, slowly start replacing disposables and short-term items with stuff that is refillable and/or built to last. Start with the problem areas you identified in your waste audit. For consumables, buy in bulk and avoid plastic packaging as much as possible. Glass and metal containers tend to be easier to recycle.

Think about end of life for your goods

Most people already recycle, but they key is to recycle well. Usually, your municipal government will have online tools to help you recycle properly. But it’s important to know that you can recycle things that your city or town will not accept. Increasingly, you can bring short-term items back to the companies that made them for recycling.

Check out Terracycle to see if any of their recycling programs meet your needs. Terracycle is an organization that collects difficult to recycle items in 21 countries. You have to join and look at their specific programs though – they work in partnership with companies. E.g. You can recycle Boom Chicka Pop popcorn bags through Terracycle. Other programs include: Tweed cannabis, several Burt’s Bees products, Europe’s Best frozen fruit and veg packages, e-waste, Nespresso capsules, and much more. Terracycle has public drop-off locations, or you can mail items to them. In the future we’ll do an episode on recycling so we can give it more attention.

Another great way to think about the end life of your consumables is to try composting! If you’re not composting your food, it goes into landfill where it produces methane. That’s because landfills are tightly packed so there isn’t enough oxygen for it to decompose properly. When food waste breaks down in landfill, it releases methane, which is a super potent GHG. Project Drawdown estimates that composting can reduce emissions by 2.3 billion tons over the next 30 years. About 40% of landfill material is organics – so if we all composted we could make a big difference.

And of course, if you are donating a good, be smart about it. Try starting with friends and family. Then, use the tips we suggested in our clothing series!

Try out a waste-free shop

Waste-free stores are shops where all of the products come with either no packaging or recyclable/compostable packaging. They usually have a system where you weigh your container, then you fill it and are charged by weight. Zero-waste stores have opened up in trendy neighbourhoods in the last five years. An article in the Guardian estimated that 100-200 zero-waste stores had opened in the last two years in the UK.

If you are in a medium-large city, there is probably a waste-free shop somewhere. Toronto has a handful of them, for example. There are some online as well: Package Free Shop is great, and I go to it for anything I can’t find in a local waste-free shop.

If there isn’t a waste-free shop in your area, you still have options. Check out Bulk Barn and other bulk stores for food items: it’s cheaper and there is more selection. If you aren’t sure where to find waste-free or bulk stores in your neighbourhood, this tool from Zero Waste Home is helpful. For produce, choose no/low packaging items at a grocery store or farmer’s market. For personal care products, Lush has an array of low/no-waste products.

You can also try “do it yourself” solutions using bulk ingredients. There are lots of recipes out there from all of the zero waste advocates mentioned above. Try one out! Things like cleaning supplies tend to be very easy and accessible to make. Lotions, lip balms, etc. can be super easy too.

Endnotes

[1] McCallum, Will. (2018). How to Give Up Plastic. London, UK: Penguin Life.

[2] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[3] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[4] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[5] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[6] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste. New York: the Countryman Press.

[7] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[8] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[9] Kellogg, 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[10] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic at p.3-4.

[11] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[12] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[13] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[14] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[15] McCallum, How to Give Up Plastic.

[16] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[17] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

[18] Kellogg, Kathryn. (2019). 101 Ways to Go Zero Waste.

Episodes 12, 13, and 14 - Clothing

People

Fast Fashion

Fast Fashion has gotten a lot of buzz recently. Hasan Minhaj devoted an entire episode of The Patriot Act to it. CBC did a documentary on fast fashion, called Fashion’s Dirty Secrets. There have also been books published on fast fashion, like Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas or Over-Dressed by Elizabeth Cline.

Zara is often the brand people think about when they think of fast fashion. It is the world’s largest fashion brand, producing more than 450 million items in 2018.[1] Zara was a pioneer in fast fashion, and it has changed the apparel business paradigm. Other retailers have since gotten on board.

Essentially, under the model of fast fashion, brands take designs from top-tier fashion designers. Then they produce a cheaper version with worse fabric and sell it at low prices to middle-market consumers.[2] It’s called fast fashion because production and sales have been sped up.[3] Between 2000 and 2014, the number of garments doubled: 100 billion garments are now produced annually.[4] That amounts to fourteen new garments annually for everyone on the planet.[5]

In a way, fast fashion has democratized or massified fashion – bringing high design to regular consumers. But fast fashion has also caused a lot of problems

As a result of fast fashion, we have lots of poor-quality clothes and we don’t wear them for very long. On average clothing is worn seven times before being disposed of,[6] mostly to landfill. Shoppers buy five times more clothing now than they did in 1980.[7] In 2018, the average consumer bought 68 garments.[8] 

French designer Jean Paul Gaultier has said: “The system doesn’t work… There aren’t enough people to buy them. We’re making clothes that aren’t designed to be worn. Too many clothes kills clothes.”[9]

Offshoring and the Fractured Supply Chain

Another important change, to set the context, has been the globalization of clothing supply chains. This change is often called “offshoring”, which basically means relocating factories in countries with low labour costs. Offshoring has changed the industry dramatically over the last thirty years. In 1991, 56.2% of all clothes purchased in the United States were American-made. By 2012, it was 2.5%.[10]

And today that supply chain is not only offshore, it’s also fractured. Fabric is woven and dyed in one place, cut in another, sewn somewhere else, and then zippers and buttons are attached in another location.[11] Brands rarely own the factories that make their clothes. They contract to suppliers, who often subcontract to other suppliers.

Together, this creates challenges for ensuring workers’ safety and rights. And that matters: “fashion employs one out of six people on the globe, making it the most labor-intensive industry out there – more than agriculture, more than defense. Fewer than 2 percent of them [garment workers] earn a living wage.”[12]

The fashion industry’s supply chain has roughly six stages:

1.     Planting and harvesting the raw materials (e.g., cotton)

2.     Weaving the fibre into cloth

3.     Finishing and shipping the cloth to distributors

4.     Producing the garments

5.     Shipping finished products to the warehouse

6.     Distribution from the warehouse to the storefront

Within each of these stages, there can be different steps. For instance, dyeing isn’t included in here, but it will occur in most cases. For blue jeans the supply chain will also typically include distressing at a washhouse. These steps may occur in different locations.

Sweatshops

The garment industry has had sweatshops since the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830s, the invention of the lockstitch sewing machine made possible mechanization of clothes-making.[13]

Cotton mills in particular were horrorscapes. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote about the conditions they observed in cotton mills, where death, mutilation, rape, and illness were common. Engels was so horrified by what he saw that he called mill work a new form of enslavement.[14]

One of the most famous incidents in historical sweatshops was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place in 1911. 146 employees died in that fire (123 women and 23 men). The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire was NYC’s worst workplace disaster until 9/11.[15]

After a lot of activism, workers’ protections were introduced. In America, Frances Perkins, Labour Secretary under FDR, introduced a number of legislative protections for workers, which cleaned up the manufacturing industry.[16]

Unfortunately, when production moved offshore in the 1990s, “the old-style sweatshop system came roaring back to life.”[17] The EU is still a major apparel exporter, but most garments are exported from Asia. China is the top apparel supplier, followed by the EU, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India, Hong Kong, and Turkey.

Offshore sweatshops today look a lot like the sweatshops of the 1800s and early 1900s. They are hot, unsanitary, dusty, and unsafe. There is often no food or clean drinking water. Workers work long hours for low wages. They often don’t get breaks and are forced to work overtime for no pay. Buildings are often locked. Workers sometimes can’t talk to each other. And as most workers are women while most supervisors are men, sexual assault and rape is endemic.

In wealthy countries like the US and Canada, there are domestic sweatshops, too. When the FDR-era reforms got rid of legal sweatshops, sweatshops became less common – but they didn’t disappear entirely. There are still sweatshops in wealthy countries, but they exist illegally and are run by organized crime. Because of their illicit nature, these sweatshops are also hubs for human trafficking and money laundering. [18] Domestic sweatshops are a particular problem in the US, and especially LA, because of the large undocumented immigrant population. About half of the apparel manufacturing workers in LA are estimated to be undocumented workers who make as little as $4 per day.[19]

Rana Plaza

Beyond the generally shitty working conditions, there are still frequent sweatshop disasters on the same scale or larger than the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

One of the most famous ones took place in Bangladesh in 2013. On 13 April 2013 there was an explosion at the Rana Plaza garment factory. It ripped a hole in the wall. Engineers wanted to condemn the building immediately, but the owner refused.[20] The next day, workers returned. The power went out and, as backup generators went on, the building began to quake. Then, “It went down.”[21] Rana Plaza was the deadliest garment factory accident in modern history. 1,134 people died and another 2,500 were injured.

The infuriating thing, though, is that it was the third high-profile sweatshop disaster in Bangladesh within three years. A December 2010 fire at the That’s It Sportswear garment factory killed 29 and injured more than 100. Gap had just finished inspecting the factory.[22] In November 2012, a fire at the Tazreen Fashion factory killed at least 117 and left 200 injured.[23] Sears, Walmart, and Disney products were produced there. Overall, between 2006 and 2012, more than five hundred Bangladeshi garment workers died in factory fires.[24]

After a 2010 fire, NGOs created the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement. It went unsigned until winter 2012.[25] Then, a handful of companies signed on when ABC News ran a story on the 2010 fire. Most other brands did not act until after the Rana Plaza explosion. And even then, a number of brands went with a watered-down voluntary agreement called the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety, which was not legally binding.

There have been some changes since Rana Plaza, but unsafe sweatshops still exist there.[26] And as of 2017, 95% of buildings in Dhaka still do not have a fire exit. A recent study found that firms support factory safety but aren’t willing to increase prices, so factories have to absorb these costs themselves. And although the incidence of sweatshops went down after Rana Plaza, there are still problems of low wages, long working hours, overtime, abusive supervision, and union busting. The optimistic way of framing this is that activism and public pressure can work, but it needs to be sustained in order to really generate progress.

A garment factory fire in New Delhi killed 43 people in December 2019.

Child Labour

The garment industry is also a hotbed for child labour. Child labour has been an unfortunately common practice in the apparel industry going back to the advent of mechanized clothing production. Lots of sweatshops have children working in them.

For example, in 2016 “H&M, Next, and Esprit were found to have Syrian refugee children sewing and hauling bundles of clothes in subcontracted workshops in Turkey.”[27]

Sometimes children are lured from their homes to work in sweatshops. For instance, a report by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and the India Committee of the Netherlands (ICN) found that: “recruiters in southern India convince parents in impoverished rural areas to send their daughters to spinning mills with promises of a well-paid job, comfortable accommodation, three nutritious meals a day and opportunities for training and schooling, as well as a lump sum payment at the end of three years.” (from the Guardian) But in reality, “Girls and young women are being lured from their home villages by false promises and are working under appalling conditions amounting to forced labour” (SOMO and ICN).

Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Uzbekistan are particularly notorious for child labour in the textile and garment industry.

Child labour occurs at different phases of the supply chain, from the production of cotton seeds (Benin), cotton harvesting (Uzbekistan), yarn spinning (India), and “cut-make-trim” garment production in factories (Bangladesh). An investigation by SOMO found that 60% of the workers at spinning mills in India were under 18 when they started working there (the youngest workers were 15).

Forced and child labour in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry is particularly egregious. “Every year […] approximately 1m people – including teachers, doctors and students – are dumped in Uzbekistan’s cotton fields to pick “white gold”. They are taken from their jobs and their schools, sometimes threatened with expulsion or dismissal or physical violence, and compelled to meet quotas to help the government earn some hard cash.” (From the Economist) This is a unique case of state-sanctioned mass mobilization of child and forced labour.

The Uzbekistani government sets cotton quotas. If famers don’t fulfil their quotas they can be kicked off of their land. But farmers can’t afford extra farm hands for harvest, so state officials order state employees (e.g. doctors and nurses) and students into the fields. A study by the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London found that between 86 and 100 percent of schools in the districts that they studied were subject to compulsory recruitment of children in grades 5-9 (ages 11-14). Students were employed in the cotton harvest for between 51 and 63 days without breaks and under unsanitary, unhealthy, and nutritional conditions.

The Responsible Sourcing Network has convinced 314 companies to pledge to eliminate Uzbek cotton from their supply chains. You can check out the list of brands here. As a result of advocacy efforts, the export of Uzbek cotton has been reduced from 2.5 million bales to 0.7 million bales in the last decade. The pledge was launched in 2011. American Apparel, as of December 2019, still has not signed the pledge. It is one of the last remaining American brands to do so. Polo Ralph Lauren is another non-signatory. I also did not see Roots Canada on the list.

Outside of Uzbekistan, child labour in the garment industry may not be state-sanctioned, but this does not make it any less harmful.

Forced Labour

The fashion industry is also one of the biggest sources of modern slavery. The Walk Free Foundation estimates that $127.7 billion USD worth of garments imported annually by G20 countries are at-risk of modern slavery.

Last year it was revealed that China is operating forced labour camps in Xinjiang province. Uighurs detained in “re-education camps” are reportedly working in factories producing cars, cotton, and clothing. Brands so far have said that they haven’t found evidence that the labour in these factories is forced, but investigative journalism has come to a different conclusion.

Women’s Rights and Sexual Assault

Fast fashion is fundamentally a gender inequality issue. Approximately 80% of workers in the garment industry are women between the ages of 18 and 35.

Rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are big problems in sweatshops. For instance, a study by the Fair Wear Foundation and Care International found that 43% of women interviewed in Vietnamese factories said they had suffered at least one form of violence and/or harassment in the last year. Research by ActionAid found that 80% of garment workers in Bangladesh have either seen or directly experienced sexual violence or harassment in the workplace.

So Why Is Everything So Shitty? 

Here is where the fractured supply chain comes in: when disasters and abuses like these happen, brands often claim that they are not responsible, that the sweatshops in questions were not authorized suppliers. Basically, big brands have approved suppliers, and those approved suppliers subcontract to sweatshops. When a scandal happens, brands that claim to be sweatshop-free will “often claim they had no idea their “approved” contractors were subcontracting to sweatshops.”[28]

Are Things Getting Better?

Not really, no. These problems are fundamental to how fast fashion works: there is a need to get clothes made really quickly and really cheaply. People and the environment inevitably suffer.

There have been some changes, though. The first industry shift was a move toward supplier codes of conduct. In the mid-1990s, American apparel brands faced criticism over offshore sweatshops. “In response, some started drafting “codes of conduct”: a list of standards that a company expects its suppliers to respect.”[29] Levi Strauss approved fashion’s first code of conduct in 1992.[30]

The independent audits that are used to enforce the codes aren’t great. Visits are often announced in advance. And the monitors themselves have no oversight, so things like bribery can happen.[31] Still, this IS progress. In 1998 about 15% of company codes of conduct included freedom of association and collective bargaining, and now nearly all do. [32]

Another big move is transparency: it is becoming more common for brands to publish supplier lists.[33] Fashion Revolution and other NGOs have been instrumental in pushing fashion brands to be more transparent.

How You Can Act to Promote Human Rights in the Clothing Industry

Fashion Revolution

Fashion Revolution promotes a more ethical and sustainable fashion industry. Their manifesto is pretty holistic (it covers dignified work, fair and equal pay, labour rights, cultural appropriation, solidarity, environmental impact, the throwaway culture, transparency and accountability).

Fashion Revolution was founded in reaction to the Rana Plaza disaster. It is most well-known for publishing an annual Transparency Index. But Fashion Revolution also organizes Fashion Revolution Week and runs the #whomademyclothes and #imadeyourclothes campaigns.

Fair Wear

Fair Wear is an organization that is working to promote worker and human rights in garment production. They focus on the sewing, cutting, and trimming processes because those are the most labour-intensive parts of the supply chain. 133 brands have signed onto the Fair Wear Foundation’s Code of Labour Practices. You can check them out here.

Environment

The environmental impact of clothing comes from three different stages of production: the impact of producing the fabrics from which clothing is made; the impact of moving those fabrics around, turning them into garments, and selling them; and the impact of clothing disposal.

Fabrics

Fashion’s environmental footprint is mostly from manufacturing textiles – so, growing or making, then spinning, dyeing, and finishing the fabrics.[34] Examining the environmental impact of clothing means looking at the different fabrics that make up our clothing. The most commonly used fabrics in clothing today are cotton and polyester. They make up 75% of the global fibre market.[35]

Polyester

Polyester is everywhere. It is present in 60% of clothing.[36] There has been a 157% increase in the use of polyester between 2000 and 2016.[37] That is because polyester is the backbone of fast fashion: “it is the cheap, easy-to-produce material that an industry built on low price and speed depends on.”[38]

Polyester is plastic. It is made from fossil fuels, which are non-renewable and contribute to climate change. The demand for polyester and other plastics drives investment in petrochemical refining.[39]

Polyester has a huge waste problem. Because it is plastic, polyester does not readily biodegrade. And we really have no plan for what to do with the massive volumes of polyester we are producing. Right now, only a very small amount of polyester clothing uses recycled plastic, and typically this is from plastic bottles rather than plastic clothing.[40] And of course, go back to our laundry episode to hear more about how it sheds plastic microfibres.

Given that polyester is everywhere, if you want to buy the best version of the stuff, try to seek out recycled polyester or polyester that is certified hazardous substances free.[41]

Other synthetics – Spandex, Nylon, Acrylic, Polyurethane, PVC

There is a variety of synthetic fibres in clothing, and they are all slightly different. Nylon is present in 5% of clothing, making it the second most common synthetic fabric, next to polyester. Acrylic is the third most common synthetic material. It is present in 2% of clothing. It is a cheap alternative to wool. Spandex makes stuff stretchy. Polyurethane is used in things like coatings and faux leather

Most synthetics seem to have problems with carcinogens, and they all take a lot of energy to make.[42] As with polyester, Elizabeth Cline recommends looking for synthetics with safe-chemistry labels, as well as recycled synthetics.[43] She also recommends avoiding all polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which is used for vinyl and some faux leather, since it often includes a chemical that is linked to endocrine disruption.[44]

Cotton

Cotton makes up about a quarter of global fibre production.[45] The majority of cotton is grown in China, India, and the United States.[46]

Cotton can be tricky to grow, so usually it is farmed with a lot of pesticides and fertilized. As a result, cotton uses about 6% of all pesticides, which is more than any other major crop.[47] Twenty percent of insecticides are devoted to producing conventional cotton, even though it is grown only 2.5 percent of the world’s arable land.[48] The WHO has classified 8 out of 10 of America’s most popular cotton pesticides as hazardous.[49] These pesticides can poison workers, as well as the people and environment around cotton farms (when it gets into the air, water, and soil).[50]

Cotton is also super thirsty. Growing one kilo of conventional cotton requires 10,000 litres of water (2,600 gallons). And processing cotton requires even more: about 5,000 gallons for a t-shirt and a pair of jeans.[51] The good news is that organic cotton can be grown with up to 91% less irrigated water than conventional cotton.[52]

And almost 60% of all cotton is grown in water-scarce regions.[53] That means stuff like this happens…

The Aral Sea in Central Asia was once the world’s fourth largest lake, but today it has almost completely dried up. That is because in the 1950s the Soviets began using the rivers that feed the Aral Sea to irrigate surrounding agricultural area. It is a practice that has continued into today. As the Aral Sea has dried, it is releasing salts and carcinogens into the air, which has caused throat cancer and respiratory diseases for people in surrounding villages. How is this relevant to the fashion industry? Well, because the river is being used to irrigate 1.47 million hectares of cotton.

Where you can, try to find organic and/or fairtrade certified cotton, as well as recycled cotton.[54]

Viscose Rayon (Cellulosic Fabric)

This fabric type will show up on labels in a variety of ways, including viscose, rayon bamboo, modal, lyocell, eucalyptus, and Tencel. Some of these are identical and others are slightly different. But basically, all of these fabrics are made by chemically dissolving food from eucalyptus, beech, or bamboo trees; the chemical pulp is then reformed into a fibre.[55]Viscose or rayon (which are the same thing) makes up about 70% of this category of fibres.[56]

Cellulosic fabric and its compatriots are essentially a cheaper cousin to silk or cotton. Cellulosic fabric is also often marketed as ecologically conscious or sustainable, even though it may not be. So, you really have to be careful about greenwash with these fibres. There are some forms of viscose rayon that can be more sustainable (like lyocell).

Cellulosic fibres take a lot of energy to produce and the materials have a higher greenhouse gas impact than the manufacture of polyester or cotton.[57] They also produce a lot of waste: 70% of the tree becomes waste in the manufacturing process.[58]

And cellulosic fabric is driving deforestation. Ancient and endangered forests are being used in the manufacture of these fabrics. This includes the Amazon and Indonesia’s rainforests. But Canada’s boreal forests and Great Bear Rainforest are also being threatened by these practices. The NGO Canopy is working with clothing companies like Levi Strauss & Co., Marks & Spencer, and H & M to protect forests.

If you are going with a cellulosic fibre, try to look for lyocell (also called Lenzig Tencel), since it is the most sustainable cellulosic fabric. Look also for safe-chemicals certifications, and buy from brands that are working with Canopy.[59]

Wool and Leather

Although we did not focus on animal welfare in this episode, it is worth noting the environmental impact of animal-based fibres.

Leather has a big carbon, water, and land use footprint – we’ll do a full episode on leather, but let’s just mention that here.

Wool can be sustainable, or it can be bad for the environment – a lot depends on where it is produced and how the animals are raised.[60] Although there are different wools out there, sheep’s wool is 95% of the market.[61] Cashmere comes from goats.[62] Wool production can cause erosion when animals overgraze.[63] Cleaning raw wool creates high quantities of wastewater.[64] Also, it produces a lot of methane.[65] On the other hand, wool lasts longer than most other fabrics, so Elizabeth Cline recommends buying timeless wool products and mending them to make them last.[66] She also suggests buying organic and safe-chemicals-certified wool.[67]

Check out our Winter Gear episode to learn more about choosing between animal and synthetic materials.

Bast Fibres (Linen, Hemp, Jute, Ramie, Flax): Best Fibres

Linen is the oldest known fabric. It is a natural fibre, cultivated from the flax (linseed) plant. Together, bast fibres are about 5.5% of the global fibre market.[68] Bast fibres use less energy and fewer chemical inputs, so these fibres can be cultivated sustainably.[69] There are few environmental issues with purchasing these fabrics, but why not also look for recycled or organic bast fibres?[70]

Buying Conscious Fabrics

Whichever fibre you choose, there are a few certifications that you can look for to signal effort on one aspect of environmental stewardship.

The first set of certifications are safe-chemicals certifications, which guard against the use of hazardous materials. Some common safe-chemicals certifications include: Cradle to Cradle (C2C) Oeko-Tex, and Bluesign-approved.

Next, organics standards prohibit the use of pesticides. Some organics labels to look for in clothing include: Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), Organic Content Standard (OCS), and Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certified.

You can also look for fairtrade member and certified products. Fairtrade essentially means that the workers producing a product have been paid fairly and experience some level of safety in the workplace. See our sugar episode for more on fairtrade certification, but one label we will mention here is Fair Trade USA.

Garment Production and Distribution

Water Use

The fashion industry uses a lot of water. “If fashion production maintains its current pace, the demand for water will surpass the world’s supply by 40 percent by 2030.”[71]

Emissions

Fashion also has a big emissions footprint. Apparel and footwear production accounts for 8.1% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. And clothing production is growing at a swift pace, meaning that emissions from textile manufacturing are projected to grow by 60% by 2030.

Some companies try to use carbon offsets to improve their image, check our episode on this subject to see where we land on that.

Pollution and Hazardous Chemicals

We talked about plastic microfibres in our laundry episode. But it is worth remembering that synthetic fabrics pollute waterways when they break down in the washing machine.

In addition to plastic microfibres, toxic chemicals are a big problem in the clothing industry. 46 million tons of chemicals are used to process textiles annually, and ten percent pose a potential risk to human health.[72] Some are even linked to cancer.[73]That is a problem for worker health and the environment, as well as for us because chemicals can remain on the clothing that we buy.

In 2011 Greenpeace released a report revealing that suppliers of major clothing brands are polluting the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas with toxic, hormone-disrupting chemicals. The report focuses on pollution from two facilities in China (the Youngor Textile Complex and the Well Dyeing Factory Limited). Greenpeace took samples of wastewater discharges from the two facilities and found that alkylphenols and perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs) were present in the wastewater. These two facilities were linked to major brands including Abercrombie and Fitch; Adidas; Bauer Hockey; Calvin Klein; Converse; H&M; Lacoste; Nike; and Puma.

Greenpeace followed up this report with another one on the presence of nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs) in clothing. Their analysis of clothing bought from 15 leading clothing brands, and found that two-thirds tested positive for the presence of NPEs above the limit of detection.

Why are NPEs bad? NPEs wash off of the clothing and break down into nonylphenols, which then accumulate in the food chain. Nonylphenols are hella toxic. So even though NPEs are banned in some places… they can still end up in the water supply when people wash clothing produced with NPEs elsewhere.

Tools for Seeking Out Conscious Brands

If you are interested in finding conscious brands, there are some tools out there to help!

The Good on You App and website rates the ethics and sustainability of fashion brands. Done Good is a web directory of conscious fashion brands. You can buy directly from the website. Rank A Brand assesses and ranks consumer brands on sustainability and social responsibility. There is, of course, also Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index, which focuses on supply chain transparency. (For more on this, see our very first episode!) And you can also consult the Ethical Fashion Report. 

End-of Life

We, as a society, are throwing out so many clothes. Every second, the equivalent of one garbage truck of textiles enters landfill or is burned, which amounts to a $500 billion USD loss in value due to clothing waste. In the United States, 23.8 billion pounds of clothes are thrown in the garbage annually, which is about 73 pounds per person![74] Clothing is the fastest-growing category of waste in US landfills.[75]

In addition to the problem of waste from landfilling clothes, this can be an environmental problem. Natural fibres slowly decompose. When they are trapped in the landfill, they release methane, which is super bad for climate change.[76] Synthetic clothing can take hundreds of years to biodegrade, but the hazardous chemicals they are made out of can be released into the air or ground as they slowly break down.[77] For every 2 million tons of textiles we keep out landfills, we can reduce carbon emissions equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road.[78]

Escaping Fast Fashion

Trying to incorporate ethics in clothing can be overwhelming. But the overall message to take is that we do need to reject the mentality of fast fashion, since the business model itself is causing a lot of problems.

More than 70% of the average wardrobe is going unworn.[79] Being more intentional about your wardrobe is an important first step. And, of course, just wearing what you have for longer is the biggest way to have an impact. But if you’ve got a fast fashion wardrobe full of shitty materials that wear out quickly, that can be tricky. So, what do you do?

You can work towards building a conscious closet.

The Conscious Closet

What is a conscious closet? According to Elizabeth Cline, author of The Conscious Closet: “A conscious closet is a wardrobe built with greater intention and awareness of our clothes, where they come from, what they’re made out of, and why they matter.”[80]

There are lots of different tools and strategies to build a conscious closet, and the mix that works best for you will be different than for everyone else. But Cline identifies three Fashion Personality Types that can help to guide you. Minimalists buy for keeps, have a more timeless look, and want to cut clutter from their lives. Style Seekers are maximalists; they want statement pieces and lots of change. Traditionalists are somewhere in the middle.

There are six components of a conscious closet:

1.     For-keeps: clothes you already own, love, and want to keep wearing;

2.     New-to-you: swapped, borrowed, handmade, hand-me-downs, resale, secondhand, thrifted, vintage;

3.     Rentals;

4.     Quality: timeless pieces that are built to last;

5.     Better Big Brands: clothes by the big brands that are on the right path, compared to their peers; and

6.     Conscious Superstars: the most pioneering, ethical, and sustainable brands.

Conscious Closet Inventory and Cleanout

Cline suggests starting with a Conscious Closet Cleanout, which is a good way to really examine what you own, how often you wear it (if at all), what it’s made of, et cetera. But this isn’t like Marie Kondo-ing your wardrobe. Cline wants to emphasize that you should not throw anything away.

We reproduced this impact inventory card from Elizabeth Cline’s book, The Conscious Closet.

Here are some quick tips for doing a conscious closet cleanout. First, purge by season. Focus on in-season clothes only. So, look at sweaters in winter and sundresses in summer. Your decision-making will be better this way. Also, it will be easier to responsibly deal with end-of-life (donation etc.) if the clothing is in-season. Next, if you love it, keep it. Don’t shame yourself for things you’ve already bought. Building a conscious closet takes time. Third, pay attention to what you wear most, and why they make you happy.

Eventually you will want to find your magic wardrobe number – how many clothes you need, which will be different for everyone. Cline suggests that minimalists can be happy with 50 pieces or fewer, but style seekers might want 250+ items and that’s okay. You can use a fashion fast or a capsule wardrobe to get a better sense of what your number is. De-cluttering your wardrobe is an important element of building a conscious closet, but you don’t want to go too far.

When deciding what to get rid of, here are a few tips. Aim for balance and look for things that go together. Look for pieces that don’t go with anything else. Then, either find a way to make them work or prune them. Cut back on trendy pieces. Learn from items you’ve never worn. When you are eliminating bad fabrics, focus on which fabrics wore out more quickly and what brands produced them. If you are even a little unsure, keep the item for a while and give it another go. And repair items if you can!

Reuse Plan

When you are getting rid of clothes, how do you deal with it responsibly? Cline calls this a “Reuse Plan”.

There are four different ways that you can consciously get rid of clothes, but you need to really think about the item, and which is the best fit.

1.     Donate or give away: do that when clothes are in a clean and wearable condition.

2.     Sell or swap: do this for your highest-value, on-trend, and in-season pieces when they are in pristine condition.

3.     Repair: do it where you can and either keep it for yourself or put it in one of the first two categories.

4.     Recycle: when items are worn-out beyond repair, do this.

Donations

Charities only sell about 20-25% of what we donate. The rest gets exported overseas or downcycled (turned into mattress stuffing, insulation, or rags). [81]

Exporting clothes sounds nice, but it is actually a big problem. Used clothes exports have tripled in fifteen years – the US exports 1.7 billion pounds of clothes annually.[82] Most exported clothes go to sub-Saharan Africa, where second-hand dealers distribute and sell it.[83]Although this sounds nice, the volume and low quality of the apparel that is donated means that those second-hand dealers aren’t able to make a living anymore; many are living in extreme poverty.[84] And ultimately a lot of this stuff ends up as garbage. One NGO found that 40% of all used clothing imported to Ghana is immediately landfilled rather than worn or resold.[85]

So, how can you donate effectively? Investigate first: make sure that you are giving to a reputable charity. Vet clothing donations bins. You can do this by looking for bins that are clearly marked with the organization’s name and going to their website. Find out what their acceptance policies are and where they send the clothes that they collect. Depending on what you are donating, you can often donate directly to those in need: homeless shelters, crisis centres, and churches. If you can meet a direct clothing need, this can help assure that your donation won’t end up in a landfill.

For example, Kristen’s building has a Diabetes Canada bin. The website says that their clothes are collected by the linked social enterprise National Diabetes Trust. It delivers clothing to Value Village, though, and they are not transparent about where unsold clothing goes. Kristen didn’t love this option.

Dress for Success Toronto is a charity that provides support, professional attire, and tools to help women achieve economic independence. Dress for Success international has a high (91.4%) charity rating. Kristen ultimately decided that this was the best option for the item she wanted to donate (a pair of dress pants).

It is also crucial that you follow basic used clothing etiquette. First and foremost: always, always, always clean your clothes first. It’s the best way to keep them from ending up as trash. Remove personal belongings from pockets. And tie your shoelaces together! That way the shoes don’t lose each other when they go through re-sorting. You should also mend and repair donated clothing whenever possible. Tears and stains often result in immediate landfilling: usually clothes aren’t getting repaired by the second-hand market. And never leave your donations outside unattended, because they can get rained on and then they will be landfilled.

Recycling

Most clothes are recycled through downcycling: the clothes you recycle are turned into lower-quality products like rags or insulation. That doesn’t solve the waste problem because these still eventually end up in a landfill. But it does increase the length of their lifespan, and that is good.

There are companies working on recapturing cotton that can be used again in exactly the same way as virgin fabrics, which is neat. Hopefully in the future that will be possible and affordable!

For now, though, how do you recycle clothes responsibly? If you are donating your clothes to major charities or thrift shops, a lot of it is likely already being recycled.[86] But ask to make sure! Kristen asked her local Value Village and found out that they do not do this: unsold items get shipped to Africa, where they are most likely landfilled.

There are also in-store garment recycling options. Brands (like Patagonia) sometimes will recycle or repair their own clothing, taking responsibility for end-of-life. A few other brands offer to take and recycle clothing of all brands. Depending on where you live, you may also be able have municipal clothes recycling, so look into this.

In Toronto, where Kristen lives, there is not a municipal clothes recycling program. But H&M, American Eagle, Puma, and North Face all have recycling programs that will accept any brand of clothing. All four brands use the same company (I:CO) to sort and reprocess the clothes, so is very likely that it makes no difference which of these programs you use. Clothes donated through this program are most likely to be downcycled, assuming they are in good enough condition.

Selling and Swapping

If you want to resell your clothes, you have a few options. You can use an online service that takes on the process of selling clothes for you, like thredUP and the RealReal. You can try to sell clothes yourself online through websites like Poshmark. Or you can sell in person through consignment stores.

The types of clothing that do well in the resale market include: on-trend and recent purchases; luxury and designer brands; and in-season items. If you bought something but never wore it and the tags are still on, resale might be a good option – especially if it is from a high-end brand.

Bypass resale if your clothes are damaged; if they are basics; or if they are kids’ clothes, menswear, or workwear. These do not sell well.

You can also organize a clothing swap with friends or a community group. Cline has some suggestions in her book for setting up a clothing swap. But here is another article with quick tips.

Clothes Rentals

Clothing rentals can be a great option if you are the kind of person that needs a lot of trendy pieces in your wardrobe. There are lots of options for renting from clothes rental companies, as well as a few where you can rent items from your wardrobe.  

There are basically two different kinds of clothing rental options: onetime rentals and monthly subscription plans. Rental companies will clean and repair clothes, so no worries there. With rentals, there are shipping and packaging concerns to think about. But this is minimal in comparison to the environmental impact of making clothes.

Your location will determine what your clothes rental options are. In Toronto, there are a few companies.

Dresst is a Toronto-based clothing rental subscription company. When you purchase a membership, you can rent a set number of items for each month. At the end of the month you return the item(s) and they clean it and rent it to someone else. Dresst charges $49/month for one item or $99/month for three items.

Fitzroy is a dress rental company in Toronto. If you are in need of a luscious party gown, this is a great option. Most of the rentals were around $100.

Reheart is a rental website where you can lend or rent. As a lender you get a cut of the profits from renting your item (less than 50%, but Reheart deals with cleaning et cetera). It can be a good way to de-clutter.

Escaping fast fashion is about valuing your clothes more, from the time you are deciding whether to purchase (or rent) them until you have responsibly disposed of the item. Try to think about clothes as an investment, rather than something disposable. Ultimately, you’ll save money and love your wardrobe more!

Endnotes

[1] Thomas, Dana. (2019). Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes. New York: Penguin Press at p.1.

[2] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.31.

[3] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.31.

[4] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.34.

[5] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.35.

[6] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[7] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[8] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.3.

[9] Cited in Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.36.

[10] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.5.

[11] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.35.

[12] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.6.

[13] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[14] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.45.

[15] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[16] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[17] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.47.

[18] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.41.

[19] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.40.

[20] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[21] Shila Begum, worker at Rana Plaza, quoted in Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.57.

[22] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[23] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.55.

[24] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.54.

[25] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[26] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[27] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.6.

[28] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.42.

[29] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.50.

[30] Thomas, Fashionopolis.

[31] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.51.

[32] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.65.

[33] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.65.

[34] Cline, Elizabeth. (2019). The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good. NY: Penguin Randomhouse.

[35] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[36] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.199.

[37] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.199.

[38] Cline, The Conscious Closet at p.162.

[39] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[40] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[41] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[42] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[43] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[44] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[45] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[46] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[47] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[48] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.70.

[49] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.70.

[50] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[51] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.71.

[52] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[53] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[54] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[55] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[56] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[57] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[58] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[59] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[60] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[61] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[62] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[63] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[64] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[65] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[66] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[67] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[68] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[69] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[70] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[71] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.71.

[72] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[73] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[74] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[75] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[76] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[77] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[78] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[79] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[80] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[81] Thomas, Fashionopolis at p.194.

[82] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[83] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[84] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[85] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

[86] Cline, The Conscious Closet.

Episode 10 - Sugar

This episode featured the inimitable Alexandra Sundarsingh, a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lex is an historian of food, migration, and labour. She is also part of the Canadian debate illuminati, which is how she and Kristen became friends. Lex highly recommends that you check out the book Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz – which Lex drew on for some of the information in this episode. (Actually, Lex wants you to gift this book to pretty much everyone you know; we’d endorse that).

We were really excited to link Lex’s expertise on the history of sugar to some of the present-day practices of the sugar industry. So, the research note below focuses primarily on modern human rights abuses in the sugar industry. There is also some information about sugar and the environment, which Kristen collected but did not discuss – like, y’all, we had been recording for two hours and we thought, ‘Let’s maybe save this for a future episode.’ But we’ve put the notes here just in case you want to know what we found.

Background

What is sugar?

Sugar (sucrose) is produced from two major sources: sugarcane and sugar beets. We did not talk about corn syrup (fructose) in this episode, but it could have (probably will have) an entire episode to itself. We also didn’t talk about maple syrup.

Sugarcane is a grass that reaches 10-20 feet. It grows in warm, humid conditions, typically near the equator. It is a perennial. Sugar beet is a 3-5 pound off-white root crop. It can grow in temperate climates with warm days and cool nights. More than 145 million tonnes of sugar is produced annually in 120 countries.

Here are some different kinds of sugar:

·      Granulated sugar: pure sucrose, the most common form of sugar;

·      Icing sugar: powdered granulated sugar with cornstarch to prevent caking;

·      Brown sugar: produced by crystallizing the golden coloured syrup (before purification?) or mixing molasses syrups with white sugar

·      Liquid sugar

·      Other specialty sugars (e.g. plantation raw, organic)

How is sugar made?

Sugar-making is a multifaceted process. Briefly, here are the steps of the process:

·      Sugar plants are cultivated and harvested;

·      Then they are washed and sent to sugar refineries for processing;

·      Processing sugar starts by slicing sugar beets or crushing sugar cane;

·      Then the sugar is extracted by essentially stewing the sugar in hot water to make a juice;

·      Next, the pulp is removed;

·      Then the sugar is purified using a lime solution and concentrated by boiling it at a low temperature;

·      After a thick juice is produced, it is crystallized, spun in a centrifuge, and dried/cooled;

·      Finally, the sugar is packaged and distributed.

There’s a really good video on sugar beet production from How It’s Made. If you are interested in making your own, here is a link to a DIY process. To be honest, though, it seems a lot less efficient than the manufacturing process. But hey, if you’ve got sugar beets on-hand, you do you. The fibre that remains as a by-product of the sugar refining process is used to generate electricity, or it can be manufactured into paper goods or pelletized for animal feed.

Where does our sugar come from?

Most of the sugar that we consume (60-70%) worldwide comes from cane sugar, while the remainder is from sugar beet. Depending on where you live, that proportion can be very different. Fun fact: sugar beet rose in popularity as a result of a blockade of French trade lines during the Napoleonic wars.

The top five global sugar cane producers are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, and Pakistan. If we’re talking about both kinds of sugar, the only major change is that the EU takes third place. Brazil alone accounts for more than half (52%) of the world’s sugar market. 

Almost all Canadian sugar (90%) is from imported raw cane sugar. The remaining 10% is beet sugar, mostly from Alberta. When we import the raw cane sugar, it is processed by Canadian refineries in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Albertan sugar beets are processed by a Canadian company called Rogers Lantic – the product of a recent merger of an east coast sugar company (Lantic) and a western Canadian company (Rogers). All Canadian sugar beets are processed by a refinery in Taber, Alberta. If you’re buying Rogers sugar with a black stamp on the bag that starts with the number 22, you’re buying Albertan beet sugar. There is also some sugar beet production in Ontario near a processing plant in Michigan.

Canada’s sugar industry is essentially dominated by Rogers-Lantic and Redpath Sugar. There are Canadian sugar refineries in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and BC. Aside from the Taber facility in Alberta, Canadian sugar refineries all process cane sugar.

Labour Abuses and the Sugar Industry

Human rights and cane sugar farming

Historically, sugar cane has well-documented links to slavery. But what are the practices today? Well, in short: it’s not great. Child labour, forced labour, and bonded labour are still prominent facets of sugarcane cultivation today.

Children between the ages of five and fifteen are engaged in child labour on sugar plantations. They may work as unpaid family helpers or migrate with their parents to find work on commercial plantations during harvest season. In El Salvador, for example, Human Rights Watch found that nearly all of the boys aged fourteen and older harvested sugarcane. And it’s important to remember that this is dangerous work.

Sugarcane may be produced using forced labour in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, and Guatemala, according to Know the Chain. In Brazil, there are approximately 25,000 – 100,000 people in slavery, virtually all of whom are involved in agricultural work. Sugarcane production is one of the major sources of Brazilian slave labour. Most slaves work on estates in the extremely remove eastern Amazon region, occurring out of view of the population. As researcher Justin Campbell describes:

“Enslavement typically begins with a hired contractor, known as a gato, who recruits impoverished men from the slums of large cities or poor, rural villages. By offering cash up front and the promise of decent wages, he is able to entice these men to leave their homes for work on a distant estate. The men are then driven hundreds or thousands of miles to a remote ranch or plantation, where they are informed that they are in debt for the costs of transportation, food provided on the trip, and even tools. The debts are never erased; the illiterate workers have little recourse and are thus enslaved.”[1]

Research by the Conversation found that even among Bonsucro-certified sugar mills in Brazil (where workers are required to provide at least the legal minimum wage) workers’ earnings fall short of what is needed for a decent standard of living. Sugarcane is sometimes called the “hunger crop” for the poverty experienced by plantation workers.

And more generally, sugarcane workers experience negative health impacts. There was recently an epidemic of kidney disease across Central America, with rates rising by as much as 41% in some places (Nicaragua; 27% in Guatemala; 26% in El Salvador; 16% in Costa Rica). The suspected cause was heat stress from working in unsafe conditions on sugarcane plantations.

Canadian sugar beets and Japanese-Canadian internment

Canadian history: so fun! So many human rights abuses! Did you know that some of the Japanese-Canadians that were interned during WWII were forced to work on beet sugar farms? Well, they were. About 4,000 Japanese-Canadians were sent to work on sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba to fill labour shortages (of about 12,000 total interned). Fuck you, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Canadian sugar beets and the exploitation of Indigenous people

From the 1940s to the 1980s, thousands of Indigenous families were recruited to work on sugar beet farms across the prairies. Essentially, farmers would go into northern Métis reserved to offer families work harvesting sugar beets. Labour conditions were horrendous – 12-14 hour shifts with no food or water and very low pay. Living conditions were just as bad. In some cases, families received no accommodations and slept in their trucks. In other cases, they slept in tents. Indigenous workers were also subject to racism. Families continued to return because they had few other alternatives. The Department of Indian Affairs would cut off social assistance and apprehend children if they did not work on the sugar beet farms.

This practice only stopped when journalists with the Winnipeg Tribune exposed the labour conditions in Winnipeg in 1975. After that, Indigenous farm workers organized to demand better conditions. That struggle, in combination with the availability of farm machinery, ended the practice in the mid-1980s. (So yeah white Canadians did effectively nothing)

Labour practices on beet sugar farms today

What about human rights and sugar beets? We were not able to find a lot on this, but sugar beet farming today is mostly mechanized, so the labour practices are likely not so bad. However, this does prompt an ethical question of whether the guise of buying ethical – which if you’re buying beet sugar means buying from the global north – is perpetuating international income divides. That’s a tricky ethical question and at some point in the future we want to give it a full episode, because it’s a theme that we expect will recur.

For now, though, we’ll say this: we don’t think that buying beet sugar (or switching to substitutes like maple syrup) is really the right way to approach the problem. Definitely, switching to stevia is a bad way to go (see below). Instead, we think the best you can do is to: (1) support fair trade sugar and (2) support political change. More on fair trade later.

Labour practices in Canadian sugar refineries

It was tricky to find information about labour practices on sugar refineries. At least some sugar refinery workers are unionized, though. Lantic Roger’s Sugar workers in Taber, Alberta are unionized through UFCW (local 383); Lantic Suger workers in Montreal also unionized; and workers at Redpath sugar refinery in Belleville also unionized through UFCW. So even though labour issues might come up at sugar refineries, when we’re talking about labour abuses in sugar we are usually talking about sugar extraction – and mostly sugarcane extraction.

Environment and Sugar

The environmental impact of cultivating and processing sugar includes: loss of natural habitats; water use; agro-chemical use, discharge, and run-off; and air pollution (according to a study by WWF). Because sugarcane deteriorates as soon as it is harvested, it needs to be quickly transported to a refinery; in contrast, sugar beets can be stored for months.

Land use

We were unfortunately not able to find much on whether sugarcane or sugar beets are relatively more land intensive. Articles seemed to point to the fact that both divert land use. A European sugar lobby (le Comité Européen des Fabricants de Sucre) study found that sugar beets are 50% less land intensive, but this is a pretty biased source (Europeans grow sugar beet).

In 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lifted a ban on cultivating sugarcane in the Amazon rainforest and other areas of primary forest. This surprised even the sugarcane industry, which views the move as an unnecessary reputational risk. Sugarcane in Brazil is used for biofuel as well as sugar. Bolsonaro’s decision has been uniformly criticized by environmental groups. Sugarcane plantations threaten biodiversity and can cause deforestation.

Water use

Producing a 0.5 litre bottle of pop uses between 170 and 310 litres of water. Less than 1% of this is from the actual water in the final product. Most of the rest (95%) comes from the supply chain. A large portion of this comes from sourcing the sugar.

Sugarcane is a more water-intensive crop than sugar beet:

●      1 kg of sugar from sugarcane = 390 gallons of water

●      1 kg of sugar from sugar beets = 243 gallons of water

Oftentimes, to grow sugar producers will siphon water from local populations in water-stressed regions.

Air pollution

Harvesting process for sugarcane involves torching the fields to strip the crop of leaves. That causes air pollution.

Emissions

There is a lot more variability in how emissions-intensive sugar beets are, compared with sugar cane. At the high end, sugar beets and sugarcane are comparable. At the low end, sugar beets have a smaller carbon footprint. One of the big factors underlying this gap is transportation. Sugar beet is processed directly into white sugar (fewer steps than cane sugar) and generally at nearby factories.

Sustainability Labels for Sugar

Want to buy sustainable sugar? Here is some information about the ecolabels you might see.

Rainforest Alliance certification

Sustainable Agriculture Standard includes rules on biodiversity conservation; improved livelihoods and human wellbeing; natural resource conservation; and effective planning and farm management systems

Bonsucro certification

Bonsucro is a sustainability standard for sugar cultivation and processing. Producers must adhere to seven principles: obey the law; respect human rights and labour standards; manage efficiency to improve sustainability; manage biodiversity and ecosystem; continuously improve; adhere to EU directives; and organization of farmers (smallholder standard only).

Fairtrade

What is fair trade?

Fair trade is a set of movements, campaigns, and initiatives that have emerged in response to the negative effects of globalization, especially the often unjust and inequitable nature of international trade.[2] Fair trade began as a small church and Third World solidarity movement in the early postwar period.[3] Generally speaking, fair trade standards include values like decent and safe work, fair prices for producers, and sustainability

What fair trade labels are out there, and which is best?

There are five recognized fair trade labels: Fair Trade International (certified by FLOCERT); Fair Trade USA (certified by SCS Global Services); Fair for Life (certified by Institute for Marketecology (IMO)); the World Fair Trade Organization (a membership organization that recognizes its members by determining their adherence to 10 principles of fair trade); and the Fair Trade Federation (which is similar to WFTO).

Artificial Sweeteners

There are a bunch of artificial sweeteners out there, and we’ll do an episode on them sometime. But we do want to talk briefly about biopiracy and one artificial sweetener – Stevia – because it came up in the episode.

Stevia – Product of Biopiracy

Stevia is actually a product of biopiracy. Stevia rebaudiana is a plant native to eastern Paraguay and Brazil. Indigenous Guaraní peoples have traditionally used it to sweeten tea and medicine. In the late 1800s, stevia was identified in Western science as a sweetener.

Stevia is commercialized as steviol glycosides, which are ‘high-intensity’ sweeteners. Actually, it is not legal to sell Stevia leaves in EU, US, or Swiss markets. That is essentially because there has been little commercial interest in pursuing an approval process for Stevia leaves. Whereas steviol glycosides have been approved. “In practice this means that the products of large multinational corporations are able to access markets far more easily than products based on the traditional use of whole stevia leaves” (from the Bitter Taste of Stevia). Which is especially fucked because companies will play up the “natural” character of Stevia

The Guaraní have received negligible benefits from the global market for Stevia. This is in violation of their right to benefit from the use of stevia, as established under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Nagoya Protocol. Today Stevia is grown in many countries outside of Paraguay. China is now the main producer and exporter of Stevia leaves. Stevia is primarily produced by smallholder farmers.

“In Paraguay, the average smallholder producer has only 5-10 ha of arable land available, and cultivates Stevia in crop rotation with other crops such as cotton, cassava, sesame or soy bean. Similarly, in China, Stevia is typically produced by contracted smallholders on plots of […] 667 square metres” (from the Bitter Taste of Stevia).

The largest Stevia (steviol glycosides) producers are the multinational corporations Cargill, Stevia First, and DSM. There is currently an effort to produce steviol glycosides through synthetic biology (SynBio) instead of producing them from leaves. Essentially, that would mean that you wouldn’t need to cultivate stevia farms to produce steviol glycosides. If that happens it could hurt smallholder farmers in Paraguay and elsewhere.

Sugary Drinks

Ethical Consumer recommends reducing packaging and food miles by making your own sugar at home, using Fairtrade and organic ingredients

But SodaStream has some of its own issues. It has been criticized for being complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights because of its operations in the West Bank. And it was recently bought by Pepsi, which has a number of ethically questionable practices.

Call to Action

Looking for something concrete that you can do? We’ve already recommended a few actions above. As a reminder, you can always seek out more ethical sugar by buying fair trade. It is also important to help keep human rights in the sugar industry on our political radar: tell your friends about what you’ve heard; stay informed; sign petitions and support organizations (like Know the Chain and Human Rights Watch) that work to uncover human rights abuses in sugar and elsewhere. But here’s one action we would recommend taking right now: contact your MP and ask them why Canada hasn’t ratified the Nagoya Protocol.

Endnotes

[1] Campbell, Justin. (2008). A Growing Concern: Modern Slavery and Agricultural Production in Brazil and South Asia. Human Rights and Human Welfare, https://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/researchdigest/slavery/agriculture.pdf, p.131-2.

[2] This is from an edited volume: Raynolds, Laura, Murray, Douglas, and Wilkinson, John. (eds.). (2007). Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization. NY: Routledge.

[3] Ibid.

Kyla’s Notes

An interesting and well-sourced article with more on how sugar affects the brain.

An idea of average sugar intake.

More on the Maple Syrup Heist.

More info on residential schools.

Even more info on residential schools, from Secret Life of Canada, a podcast we love.

Episodes 07 and 08 - Vegetarianism

Types of Vegetarian

 There are a few different variants of vegetarianism. Generally speaking, these variants can be put into three categories: the vegetarian-inclined, vegetarians, and vegans.

 Vegetarian-inclined people can be flexitarian or semi-vegitarian. These are people that sometimes eat meat. Then there are pollotarians, who eat poultry and fowl but not other meats. Pescatarians eat fish, but not other meats.

 There are also some different kinds of vegetarians. First, ovolactarians (lacto-ovo-vegetarians) eat dairy products and eggs. Lactarians (lacto-vegetarians) eat dairy but not eggs. Ovo-vegetarians eat eggs but not dairy.

 Then there are vegans! Vegans do not eat animal products at all. However, a variant of veganism called beeganism describes people who do eat honey, but not other animal products.

 If you are interested in moving toward a plant-based diet for environmental reasons, Food is the Solution is a helpful starter. It has good recipes for people who are new to plant-based eating.

 History of Vegetarianism

 Vegetarianism has a long history.

Proto-vegetarianism

 Humans have been vegetarian since before recorded history. Anthropologists believe that early humans would have eaten a predominantly plant-based diet, out of ease. Ancient Egyptians relied mostly on wheat and barley for their diets. They refrained from eating meat, except during festivals and special occasions, for religious reasons (source).

 Pythagoreans were some of the first self-proclaimed vegetarians. This refers to the followers of Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher. They were vegetarian for religious and ethical reasons. Pythagoras considered it wrong to treat any animal differently than one would treat a human (source), as he believed all living beings had a soul. For many years following, a meatless diet was referred to at the Pythagorean diet .  Following a Pythagorean diet was linked to piety and asceticism, since meat was a symbol of wealth and power.

 During the Renaissance, being a Pythagorean was viewed as heresy. But during that same time, influential figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Montaigne began to speak out against animal cruelty (source). Leonardo da Vinci followed a Pythagorean diet and, apparently, was known to set free any caged birds that he found in the marketplace (source). Moral arguments against meat consumption gained speed after the Renaissance, but was still a fringe movement that faced ridicule from society (source)

 The early vegetarian movement

 The term ‘vegetarian’ was first listed in the OED in 1839 (source). The Vegetarian Society of England, the first vegetarian society, formed in England in 1847 in Ramsgate (source). The American Vegetarian Society formed in NYC in 1850. Notable early vegetarians include: Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi (practice of Ahimsa, non-injury), and Susan B. Anthony. Vegetarianism in the 19th and early 20th century was often associated with temperance and abstinence. There is also an uncomfortable association between some early vegetarians and the eugenics movement (e.g., John Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, was vegetarian and a huge eugenics promoter).

 Vegetarianism goes mainstream

 Vegetarianism grew in the 1970s after the publication of a bestselling book called Diet for a Small Planet, written by Francis Moore Lappe (1971). The book is on the environmental impact of eating meat. Around the same time, Peter Singer (1975) published Animal Liberation.

 1990s-today

 From the 1990s onward, it has become increasingly popular to eat a plant-based diet. As of 2018, 3 million Canadians identify as vegetarian or vegan (almost 10% of the population). This is according to research done by Sylvain Charlebois at Dalhousie University. About 8% of Americans are vegetarian or vegan, and that figure has been relatively flat since the late 1990s, according to Gallup polling data. Flexitarianism is also gaining in popularity – between 2014 and 2018, sales of meat substitutes doubled in the US (from $702M to $1.44B)

 Animal Welfare

 The animal welfare justification for vegetarianism is rooted in two questions. First, is it wrong to raise/kill animals for human consumption, even if it is done humanely? Second, is it wrong to raise/kill animals for human consumption in the way that we are doing it via industrial agriculture? Vegans would extend that question to ask whether it can ever be right to use animals for our consumption purposes (but we’ll go into that in the upcoming veganism episode).

 Animal Rights versus Suffering

 There is a debate on whether to apply a framework of rights to animal welfare concerns. The animal rights (or non-human person rights) movement argues for applying rights to non-human animals. The argument for animal rights typically relies on taking aim at the difference between animal and humans. Animal rights activists argue that humans and animals are not so different on things like consciousness and having distinct preferences. Others argue that animals don’t have rights on grounds that animals and humans are different.

 The non-human animal rights movement has often focused efforts on ‘higher’ animals like primates. In 2016, an Argentine court ordered that a chimp named Cecilia should be released from a zoo. The argument of animal rights lawyers was essentially that Cecilia’s confinement without companionship had a detrimental impact on her health.

 Peter Singer has famously rejected the use of a rights-based frame to justify vegetarianism. Instead, he uses suffering as the metric. This approach is rooted in utilitarianism. Singer essentially says that speciesism is wrong: that we shouldn’t discriminate on the grounds that a being belongs to a species. So, Singer argues that we should take into account whether we are causing harm to another being irrespective of the species. Taking that frame, Singer argues that the key metric is capacity to feel pain. It’s for this reason that he thinks it’s okay to eat bivalves (oysters, mussels, clams) because they probably don’t feel pain.

 So, even if you don’t think that animal rights, you can think that animals have interests that are violated (e.g., to live in decent conditions, to make free choices, to be free from fear/pain, to live healthy lives, to enjoy the normal social/family/community life of its species).

 Factory Farming

 You know this already: factory farming is a nightmare-scape. Factory farms are operations with more than: 500 beef or dairy cattle; 1,000 hogs; 100,000 egg-laying chickens; or 500,000 broiler chickens (sold annually). In America, the vast majority of meat is factory-farmed: upwards of 95% for most animal protein.

 Animals in factory farms have very little space. Breeding sows kept in ‘gestation crates’ that keep them completely immobilized. Most chickens are kept in ‘battery cages’, which hold 5-10 birds. Each bird may have an amount of floor space equivalent to less than a sheet of letter-sized paper. Stress from overcrowding and boredom causes aggression, which is why most pigs have their tails cut off to prevent tail-biting. For the same reason, chickens, turkeys, and ducks are often de-beaked (and a significant portion die during the ordeal). Cows are dehorned and castrated, usually without pain management.

 The overcrowding also means that animals get sick a lot, which is why factory-farmed meat is so pumped with antibiotics.

 Factory farming prioritizes productivity over the well-being of the animals. Egg-laying chickens are put through something called ‘force molting’ where they are denied food for up to two weeks, in order to shock their bodies into another egg-laying cycle. Calves in feed lots are fattened for slaughter on an unnatural diet in order to reach “market weight” of 1,200 pounds within six months. Once they reach this weight they’re killed.

 There are ways to eat non-factory farmed meat, which maybe we’ll cover in a future episode.

 Environment

 Approximately 70 billion animals are raised annually for human consumption. From an environmental perspective, animal agriculture is less efficient than plant-based agriculture, simply because we also need to feed animals when we raise them.

 Shout out to this cool study by Clark, Springmann, Hill and Tilman 2019 on the multiple health and environmental impacts of foods. They look at five health metrics: mortality, coronary heart disease, colorectal cancer, diabetes, and stroke. Clark et al. compare this against five environmental metrics: acidification potential, eutrophication potential, GHG emissions, land use, and scarcity-weighted water use. The study finds that unprocessed and processed red meat is worse on both; animal products like chicken, fish, and dairy are healthier but bad for the environment; and plant-based foods like nuts, legumes, vegetables, and grains are healthier and better for the environment. There are some really cool charts in this study for the nerds out there, so I would definitely recommend taking a look.

 Land Use

 Animal agriculture uses up a lot of land: approximately 26% of Earth’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing. And beyond that, 33% of croplands are used for livestock feed production. So, the land footprint of animal agriculture is huge. 

 We have talked about land use on the podcast before. Essentially, you want land use to be as efficient as possible because we have a finite amount of space. The more space we put toward animal agriculture, the less we have available for carbon sinks like forests and wetlands. Climate Nexus estimates that replacing beef with plants in your diet reduces the land footprint of that food by 90%. This report has cool maps on land use change in the American heartland.

 Greenhouse Gas Emissions

 Animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change: it is responsible for an estimated 18% of human caused emissions are from animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is also responsible for 44% of methane emissions and 44% of nitrous oxide emissions, two particularly bad greenhouse gases (GHGs). A total of 26% of emissions are from food more broadly (58% of which is from animal products, and 50% of which is from just beef and lamb).

 Why are emissions higher for animal agriculture? GHG emissions in animal agriculture result from the methane that is released from the digestive processes of animals, as well as animal manure. When land is converted to animal agriculture, this results in a loss of stored carbon. And we also have to include the fossil fuels used to produce mineral fertilizers for feed production. Climate Nexus estimates that replacing beef with plants in your diet reduces the GHG emissions of that food by 96%.

 Water Footprint

 We’ve talked about this before on the podcast: most of our water footprint comes from the indirect water usage that it takes to make our food. And generally speaking, meat is a lot more water-intensive to produce than plant-based food. Per calorie, beef is 10x more water-intensive than vegetables, and 3x as water-intensive at nuts. Nuts are the most water intensive category of plant-based food. Chicken is actually slightly less water-intensive to produce than nuts (per calorie), but the difference is fairly minor.

 Air Pollution

 Animal agriculture is also really bad for the air, and that is making us sick. In addition to the release of GHGs, animal agriculture produces particulate matter.

 Ambient air pollution is responsible for about 8% of all deaths annually, according to the WHO. Particulate matter is harmful to human health – it affects lung function and can aggravate other conditions (such as heart and lung disease), even leading to death. In many places like the US and Europe, the biggest source of fine-particulate air pollution isn’t cars; it’s agriculture. That fine particulate pollution comes from dry manure, feathers, bits of feed, and animal dander. When those break down, they’re released into the air.

 Eutrophication

 Animal agriculture also pollutes our waterways, leading to eutrophication. Climate Nexus estimates that replacing beef with plants in your diet reduces nitrogen fertilizer use by 94%.

Sources of eutrophication in animal agriculture include: nitrogen fertilizer run-off and leaching; manure run-off and leaching; and aquaculture. Aquaculture farms generate concentrated amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous from excrement, uneaten food, and organic waste (dead fishies).

 In addition to polluting our freshwater, this is creating something called “ocean dead-zones”. Basically, run-off of nitrogen and phosphorous creates low-oxygen areas that affect fish reproduction or even kill fish. There are more than 400 ocean dead-zones worldwide. The size of ocean dead zones has quadrupled since 1950. And most of that increase has been in coastal areas proximate to agricultural production. Coastal eutrophication from animal agriculture also contributes to ocean acidification.

Kyla’s Notes

Cheese rennet makes her sad.

Episode 06 - Beer

Beer is the fifth most consumed beverage in the world behind tea, carbonates, milk and coffee. Average global consumption is 23 litres/person per year.

Beer – what is in it and how is it made?

There are four main ingredients in beer: malt barley, hops, yeast, and water. Beer is derived from malted gains. Barley is the most usual grain, but wheat, rye, oats, and sorghum can also be used. Even in wheat beer the proportion of barley is generally over 50%. Malt provides the spectrum of colour to beer. Hops are made from the flower of the humulus lupulus plant, which is a species of flowering plant in the hemp family native to Europe, western Asia, and North America. They offset the sweetness of the malt barley. Yeast is the engine which creates beer through fermentation. Then, of course, you need water to brew beer.

To learn more, check out the steps of making beer here.

Major beer producers

The beer industry is an oligopoly with AB InBev and Heineken as the two top companies. AB InBev (Anheuser-Busch InBev) is the largest multinational beer company, with $55 billion USD in sales. It controls about 30% of the global beer market. AB InBev makes brands like Beck’s, Budweiser, Corona, Leffe, Stella Artois. Other major multinational beer companies include Heineken, Asahi Group, Kirin, Molson Coors, Carlsberg Group, and Thai Beverage.

You can find out whether your beer brand of choice is from one of these companies by going to https://isitbigbeer.com/ (although it is not comprehensive).

Beer and the Environment

Water usage

The brewing industry is one of the largest industrial users of water. 60-180 litres of water can be used to produce a litre of beer. This includes the entire life cycle of beer. One estimate suggests that the virtual water footprint of beer could be as high as 240L of water for 1L of beer. Within the brewery itself, a 5-to-1 ratio is common.

The main sources of water usage in beer production: upstream (producing and transporting raw materials, especially barley farming), operations (brewing and bottling), downstream (transporting and refrigerating the beer). More than three-quarters of the upstream environmental impact of beer is from (1) glass manufacturing, (2) barley production, and (3) malting. Big breweries are typically more water efficient than small brewers, generally speaking. However, some craft breweries are very water efficient.

Emissions

Emissions come from different stages of beer production. Brewery operations themselves are typically about 20% of overall emissions, but can be as little as 5% for environmentally-conscious breweries (according to Oxford Companion to Beer, Environmental Issues). The production of raw materials accounts for 47-63% of emissions. And packaging is 19-46%. The largest single impact in the beer supply chain is refrigeration at retail (25%).

Barley has a heavy environmental footprint. Using unmalted barley can reduce environmental footprint, as can using local organic barley.

Waste

The main sources of food waste from beer production are barley straw, malt waste, and spent grain.

Big or small: which is best?

Around half (46%) of the greenhouse gas (GHG) impact of brewing beer comes from indirect sources (barley agriculture, malted barley transportation, and bottle production). Generally speaking, large breweries are more efficient than small ones. The carbon footprint per litre of beer was more than double for craft breweries versus industrial production (in Italy).

Cans or bottles?

Bauxite is used to make aluminum, and it is often sourced from developing countries. Malaysia is now the top bauxite producer. Bauxite is typically strip-mined. And smelting aluminum is very energy-intensive. It is true that aluminum cans can be made of up to 70% recycled material (up to 40% according to the David Suzuki Foundation). Cans made with recycled materials can be more emissions efficient, as recycled aluminum uses only 3% of the energy required to produce virgin aluminum.

Glass bottles are made with silica (industrial sand and gravel), which is less energy intensive than making virgin aluminum. Glass bottles can contain approximately 30% recycled content. Manufacturing a 12-oz aluminum can is twice as energy-intensive as making a similarly-sized glass bottle.

However, aluminum cans are lighter, so they are less carbon-intensive to ship. Transporting a glass bottle emits up to 20% more GHG than a can if shipped cross-country. For this reason, the David Suzuki Foundation recommends that you use cans only if you are buying beer from far away.

Aluminum cans with plastic sleeves become an issue for recycling. These sleeves are often non-recyclable. It is also difficult to separate from the can, rendering it non-recyclable. So, the sleeves become a contaminant in the recycling stream, and can even lead to the can itself going to landfill. Craft breweries tend to use plastic sleeves because the minimum order for printing is usually pretty high.

Recycling glass is less efficient than recycling aluminum. However, glass bottles in Canada are often reused. Recovery rates are higher for glass bottles (97%, compared with 80%). In the US, this is different – cans are recycled more often than glass bottles.

In Canada, breweries can use “industry standard bottles” (IS-B). When they do, these bottled are cleaned and refilled an average of 15 times. The industry standard bottle program started by an agreement between Labatt and Molson in 1992. There were some early problems, but in 2001 the Standard Mould Bottle Agreement was struck. Signatories agreed to use only the IS-B for malt-based beverages sold/distributed in Canada in non-metal containers of less than 600ml. Around 50 Canadian breweries participating (including Molson Coors). Companies that sign on don’t have to pay provincial levies for non-refillables. The US has similar programs, but it is more prevalent in Canada. The emissions savings on washing/reusing a glass bottle versus melting and remoulding it is 92%.

So, what should you do? If you’re in Canada, buy beer in an industry standard bottle. If you’re in the US, buy an aluminum or steel can without a plastic cover. Either way, local is better. Try refillable kegs or growlers if your local brewery allows it.

Beer and Human Rights

We were not able to find much on beer and human rights, unfortunately. Maybe we will revisit this issue in a future episode. A few notes though. First, beer in aluminum cans also has the baggage of human rights abuses from bauxite production.

On labour practices in breweries, we looked a bit at unionization rates. All AB InBev beer made in the US is made by unionized workers. For other major producers, it’s a bit more mixed. You can find a list of union-made beer here. Craft breweries rarely employ unionized workers – in 2016 Gulf Island Brewery became BC’s first unionized craft brewery.

Kyla’s Notes

The colour changing gin she was drinking was Arbutus Blue Gin.
Vice published an article suggesting the higher the alcohol content, the higher the carbon footprint. Read more here!
Cider, the greenest alcohol?
While wine and beer are often not vegan (what? Why not, you ask? We talk about it more in our upcoming episode about Vegetarianism!), spirits are usually vegan unless honey or cream is used as an ingredient for flavouring.
The impact of wine on the environment appears to be ok! But this note is subject to change…
Some fun facts about different spirits!
Jobs in the alcohol industry, and revenue. And more fun revenue stats.
Alcohol’s death toll globally. And it’s health effects:
- From the WHO
- From Forbes

Episode 02 - Alternative Milks

What Are Alternative Milks?

Alternative milks are milk and milk products that are made from plants. They are also sometimes called vegan milk, plant-milk or non-dairy milks (or schmilks, if you’re a Science VS fan). The market for alternative milks is growing rapidly around the world. US non-dairy milk sales increased 61% between 2012 and 2017, according to a study by Mintel.

The most popular alternative milks are almond and soy milk (80% of market share in 2018). Soy milk is the traditional non-dairy milk. It was first sold in the US in the 1950s. But there are lots of alternatives (e.g., coconut, pecan, cashew, quinoa, hazelnut, rice, coconut, pea). Non-dairy milk alternatives can be cereal-based, legume-based, vegetable-based, seed-based, or nut-based. Oat milk is a relatively new entrant, but it ascending quickly in the alternative milk market.

Globally, the alternative milk market reached about $18.5 billion USD in 2018. By 2024, it is expected that the global alternative milk market will reach $38 billion USD, according to market research. Although this is a widespread trend, demand is growing the fastest in the Asia-Pacific region

Major alternative milk brands include Silk, Almond Breeze, and Rice Dream. Some newer entrants include Oatly, Califia Farms, New Barn Organics, Ripple Foods, Innocent, Mooala, and Malk.

Which Alternative Milk is Best?

Health

A big portion of the market for non-dairy milk is driven by health concerns. While this is a perfectly good reason to choose one product over another, we didn’t focus on it because it isn’t an ethical consideration. Non-dairy milks are not nutritionally equivalent to cow’s milk (although some vegan milks are fortified with nutrients like calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B12 to make them more comparable).
Kyla mentioned a couple statistics on global lactose intolerance, including that “65% of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy”. You can read more about that at the US National Library of Medicine website.

Animal Welfare

All of the alternative milks we’re discussing are plant-based, but they may not necessarily be vegan. Many of them are, but some use honey or other animal-based substances in some of their products.  Usually the company’s website will tell you whether their products are vegan or not.

Environment

Assessing environmental impact is complicated. No single indicator can give us a holistic impression of what is environmentally best. Some common environmental indicators include land use, water use, emissions, and energy intensity. Generally speaking, dairy milk fares poorly on all of these environmental criteria when compared with alternative milks. But it gets a bit more complicated when it comes to choosing which non-dairy milk is the best.

Land Use: It’s a Matter of L and D

Cultivating a crop takes land, and that means diverting land use from other purposes. Agricultural land use contributes to deforestation and climate change because it requires the conversion of existing ecosystems like wetlands and forests, which are carbon sinks. There can also be social justice issues when agricultural land use pushes people out of their communities. Agricultural land use is a big challenge because of its scale: agriculture covers about 40% of the world’s land area. So, if you are concerned about environmental issues, it’s best to support an alternative milk that requires relatively less land to grow.

On land use, all four of the mainstream non-dairy milks do pretty well. They are all substantially better than their dairy counterparts. And the four main non-dairy milks - rice milk, soy milk, oat milk, and almond milk - all require relatively similar amounts of land to produce. However, oat and soy milk are slightly worse than rice/almond milk.

There have been some recent reports about deforestation and the displacement of indigenous peoples as a result of soy farming. This is absolutely a concern, but keep in mind that 90% of soybean crops go into animal feed. So, most of the land displacement occurring from soy is actually consumed indirectly in the form of chicken, pork, beef, farmed fish, eggs, and dairy.

Land use is also connected to other environmental consequences. Fertilizer run-off can pollute drinking water and accelerate eutrophication.

Oat milk is an interesting alternative from the perspective of soil sustainability. Some experts argue that increasing biodiversity in crop rotations can help farmers to use less pesticides. Since corn and soybeans are the two staple crops in the typical rotation, some experts suggest that adding a third crop (like oats) to the rotation can introduce big improvements for water pollution, soil erosion, and crop yields.

Emissions: Cashews Don’t Fart

Food production is responsible for a quarter of all human-produced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Dairy milk produces more than double the GHG emissions of its non-dairy counterparts, per glass. Amongst the non-dairy alternatives, there are minor differences - with rice milk at the high end and almond milk at the low end - but in general emission rates are similar.

Water Footprint

Water footprints measure the amount of water used to produce each of the goods and services that we use. It’s an important measure to think about, because so much of our water usage comes from indirect sources - from the water that is used to make the things that we buy. And it is especially important when we’re talking about food: about 90% of the water a person consumes comes from the food they eat or the water used to make it. We might drink 3 litres of water each day, but the average water footprint for a Canadian is 6,392 litres per day.

Water footprint is a big differentiator for alternative milks. Although almond and rice milk still have a smaller water footprint than dairy milk, they are much thirstier than soy and oat milk. A single glass of almond milk requires 74 litres of water to produce - more than a typical shower. This is because of the water intensity of the crop itself: almonds require six times more water to grow than oats.

As with most environmental metrics, it matters a lot where a crop is produced. That’s another thing that puts almond milk on the negative side of the ledger: almonds are a water intense crop produced mainly in California, a region which is at high-risk of droughts. And unlike crops that can be left fallow, almond trees require water even in drought years. In contrast, oat production is a lot less geographically concentrated.

Energy Use

We weren’t able to find much about the relative energy intensity of making alternative milks, unfortunately.

Labour and Human Rights

 Most of the information out there on non-dairy milk focuses on health and environmental sustainability. It was difficult to find information on labour and human rights, even though we know that agricultural workers can experience some of the most difficult working conditions.

1.3 billion people - approximately one-third of the global workforce are employed as agricultural workers. Agricultural workers are often employed informally, paid poorly, and subject to unsafe workplace practices. They are, somewhat ironically, among the most food-insecure. More than 170,000 agricultural workers are killed doing their jobs every year. And the risk of a fatal accident is twice as high in food production than in any other sector, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Although most of the agricultural workforce is employed in developing countries, working conditions are also a concern in wealthy countries, who draw on temporary migrant workers for much of the workforce.

Generally speaking, crops like almonds and oats are less labour-intensive to harvest than fruits like avocados. But there are still significant labour concerns. And this is an area seems to be largely missing from the alternative milk conversation. Having said that, there are a few alternative milk companies out there that have ethical labour policies.

Oatly, a Swedish oat milk producer, sources its organic oats (it also uses conventional oats) from Swedish oat producers that have KRAV-certification. KRAV is a third-party organics standard that meets European Union organics regulations. KRAV also has labour and human rights provisions, including housing conditions for migrant workers.

One newer brand called REBBL, which makes plant-based “elixirs”, claims to ethically source its primary ingredients -- although they don’t use a specific certification scheme.

The Winner: Oat Milk?

Oat milk has become the darling of non-dairy milk advocates. It has three times the protein of almond milk and twice the fibre (according to Mother Jones). It uses less water - and grows in more places.

Is it better to buy or to make your own non-dairy milk? For our money, we would choose to make oat milk. It’s super easy, uses less waste, and you can control what goes into it.

Episode 01 - What is Ethical Consumption?

In this introductory episode, we explain what the Pullback podcast is all about. To illustrate how difficult it is to know what the right thing to do is, Kristen quizzes Kyla on the world of ethical consumption. If you are interested in trying the quiz, you can access it here.

Ethical Consumption Quiz

Below we include a bit more information on the themes from our ethical consumption quiz.

Ethical Consumer Labels

The first question is about ethical consumer labels. There are many of these labels, some with very robust standards and others with less rigour.

Most Effective Climate Solutions

We borrowed questions two and three from a a CNN quiz. CNN based the quiz on research done by a a group called Project Drawdown, which ranks climate change solutions.

Question two is all about food-related climate solutions. Even though throwing away less food was the most effective climate solution, the effect of eating a plant-based diet is similar. Specifically, Project Drawdown estimates the effect of the four food-based solutions as follows:

1.     Throw away less food: Similar to taking 495 million cars off the road;

2.     Eat a plant-heavy diet: Similar to taking 464 million cars off the road;

3.     Cook over clean stoves: Similar to taking 111 million cars off the road;

4.     Compost your waste: Similar to taking 16 million cars off the road.

Question three asks about waste-related climate solutions. Estimated effectiveness of the four waste-related solutions is as follows:

1.     Clean up chemicals in our refrigerators and air conditioners: Similar to taking 629 million cars off the road;

2.     Build with “greener” cement compounds: Similar to taking 47 million cars off the road;

3.     Use water more efficiently: Similar to taking 32 million cars off the road;

4.     Increase household recycling: Similar to taking 19 million cars off the road.

What’s the deal with refrigerants and climate? In the mid-20th century we used chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) in refrigerators. Unfortunately, we found out that CFCs and HCFCs destroy the ozone layer. So, in 1987 the international community came together and agreed on the Montreal Protocol, a treaty banning CFCs and HCFCs. Unfortunately, the refrigerants that have replaced the ozone-burning ones – hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – are really potent greenhouse gases. They have a warming effect 1,000 to 9,000 times stronger than CO2.

HFCs are supposed to be phased out, per an amendment to the Montreal Protocol that came into force in January 2019. The Kigali Amendment sets a goal of reducing HFCs by 80% over the next 30 years, which could avoid up to 0.4 degrees of warming. The Kigali Amendment has been ratified by Canada, Australia, most countries in Europe, and a few African and Latin American countries. The United States has not ratified the Kigali Amendment. Nor have China, Brazil, and India, which are three risk priority countries.

Managing refrigeration chemicals was ranked as the number one climate change solution, not only in this category but overall, as identified by Project Drawdown. The top five climate change solutions identified by Project Drawdown are:

1.     Manage refrigeration chemicals

2.     Install onshore wind turbines

3.     Cut down on food waste

4.     Eat more plants and less meat

5.     Restore our tropical forests

What a Waste!

Question four is about waste. According to a USA Today article by Byrnes and Frohlich — which draws on the World Bank’s What a Waste Database 2.0 — Canada produces the most waste per capita.

Generally speaking, wealthier countries waste more. High-income countries account for 16% of the world’s population but generate 34% of the world’s waste.

But this is not necessarily in the form of garbage. Municipal solid waste (MSW) is, according to Byrnes and Frohlich, “waste generated from companies, buildings, institutions, small businesses, houses, and yards”. It is often less than 5% of total waste. Canada ranks 22nd in the world for MSW.

Most waste is from other “special” waste categories - things like industrial, construction, and agricultural waste. Canada ranked as the most wasteful country in both agricultural and industrial waste.

Ethical Mobile Phones

Ethical Consumer is a nonprofit that provides information for ethical consumers. Among other things, they rate companies and products on a range of ethical criteria. Their mobile phone ratings give major phone brands a score out of 20. Ethical Consumer considers a 14+ to be an ethical company to support. 5-13 is sort of the middle range and anything under 5 is ‘needs improvement’. Most phone companies are in the messy middleThis is a holistic score looking at people, politics, animals, and product sustainability. Question five asks which major phone brand has the lowest ethical score according to this rating.

Fashion Transparency Index

Question six asks about the 2019 transparency index. Fashion Revolution is a global nonprofit that is working to make the fashion industry safer, cleaner, and fairer. Every year it publishes a transparency index which rates the transparency of 200 major fashion brands. Transparency, as they define it, means “public disclosure of sourcing relationships and of companies’ social and environmental policies and practices, goals and targets, governance, performance and progress.” The Fashion Transparency Index benchmarks brands’ public disclosures across five areas: policy and commitments; governance; supply chain traceability; supplier assessment and remediation; and spotlight issues.

Know the Chain

Know the Chain is an NGO that is working to eradicate forced labour in global supply chains. They produce annual reports on three sectors that they consider high-risk for forced labour. Those reports evaluate how major companies are doing on the issue of forced labour. Question seven asks about Know the Chain’s 2018 ITC Benchmark Report, which evaluates 40 large information, technology, and communications companies on how well they address forced labour in their supply chains.

Divestment

Divestment – or, disinvestment – is a tool that activists use to create social change. It is the act of no longer investing in something (like a financial boycott). Divestment is famously associated with anti-Apartheid advocacy targeted at South Africa in the 1980s. But it has since been applied to a range of issues. Question eight asks about a recent divestment from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).

This year CPPIB quietly divested from GEO Group and CoreCivic, two companies which hold the majority of contracts to manage ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention facilities in the US. As of 2018, it had held nearly $8 million USD in stock from those two companies. CPP did not make a public statement, and it has denied that ethical considerations prompted this decision. In fact, the CPPIB says that it does not screen individual investments “based on social, religious, economic, or political criteria”. But this decision did come after pressure from civic groups like Sum of Us and Leadnow.

CPPIB still invests in fossil fuels. However, during the recent election campaign Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also pledged to divest CPPIB from coal, oil and gas, so we will see whether that will happen. CPPIB owns shares in the handgun manufacturer Smith & Weston, as well as Ruger and Olin Corp., which produces ammunition for AR-15 rifles. And as of 2018 CPPIB had not divested from tobacco companies.

The private prison divestment movement in the US is gaining steam. This year high-profile divestment decisions were made by prominent banks. JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp all announced that they will no longer provide future financing to private prisons companies. These banks represent 72% of the total current financing available to private prison companies.

Virtual Water Footprints

“Virtual water footprint” refers to the water used to produce a finished product or service is its “virtual water” footprint. Question nine uses a calculation by environmental organization Friends of the Earth in the UK to ask which product has the highest water footprint.

E-Waste

Question ten is about e-waste (electronic waste). Globally, we produce 50 million tonnes of e-waste every year, according to a joint report of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and the World Economic Forum. Only 20% of that waste is recycled. The total estimated value of e-waste is $62.5 billion USD, which is roughly similar to the Gross Domestic Product of Croatia.