Gütersloh, 10/25/2016

"Acting Responsibly Means Reducing Emissions!"

Economy and ecology – can they coexist? Yes, says "GEO" Editor-in-Chief Christoph Kucklick, even if it is difficult to calculate nature in economic terms.

Economists and ecologists have something in common: they both love the efficient use of resources. From an environmental point of view, such efficiency is nothing more than the anticipation of a good future by showing respect for our earth. So it’s a myth that the rationality of business conflicts with the needs of nature. An entrepreneur who cuts fewer trees for a product is as satisfied as the forest whose trees are spared (assuming that the forest has a consciousness, which according to the latest research it may well have).

And yet it can be difficult to reconcile economic production and nature’s reproduction. Just how difficult, "GEO" found out some years ago. Before ecological management and carbon footprints, we were probably the first magazine to calculate our own environmental footprint. How many trees are cut down for our magazines? How much energy is required in paper production, and what pollutants result from the process? Does the ink contain hidden pollutants? How much CO2 is produced by delivery trucks on the way to newsstands – and how much by our editorial staff in carrying out research trips?

With the ambition – among others – of demonstrating to less environmentally aware companies that calculating such an imprint could be mastered, our team dove into the task. Months passed. Our colleagues dug deeper and deeper into the petrochemical details of the ink-manufacturing process, the pollutant behavior of different types of trucks, the peculiarities of Finnish forest management.

Eventually it became apparent that a clear result would be impossible to identify. Too many factors were involved in the calculation, too many unknowns. For example, the CO2 emissions of a newsstand delivery ultimately depend on such factors as the carburetor setting of the specific truck – and how does one record that precisely without looking under the hood every morning?

At the time, a solution was agreed to, which would at least offset the relatively easy-to-measure emissions, namely research trips at Gruner + Jahr. The "GEO schützt den Regenwald" (GEO Protects the Rainforest) association has since reforested an area in Nepal. And today, 300,000 more trees are on the planet. Such offsetting measures are popular, but they can only compensate for damage, not prevent it; and they cannot hide the fundamental difficulty in including nature into our calculations.

This is not because companies are unwilling, or lack the necessary knowledge. It is because economists and ecologists speak different languages. Business has developed a particularly ingenious – and singular – vocabulary to communicate its dynamics: price. It is unambiguous, the same for everyone, and communicates change without delay. Nature has nothing like that. It speaks through hidden effects, long-term disruptions and multilayered consequences: land requirements, greenhouse gases, toxins, raw material consumption and much more. And all attempts notwithstanding, its language cannot be translated into – or calculated with – a single handy metric that can compete with the informational impact of price. The efficiency of information is thus greater in economy than it is in ecology.

Therefore, as humans and in our own best interest, we must serve as translators between the spheres. There must be a convergence between the simplicity of price and the complexity of nature. Fortunately, we are getting better at doing this every day. Carbon footprinting is now more standardized than in those early days when "GEO" made its first ventures. There are significantly more pollutant calculations available, and the dramatically rapid increase in digital sensors help to measure pollution in real time. Nevertheless, the cost of ecological controlling remains high.

And practically every survey is full of surprises and often confounds common sense. For instance, a food manufacturer wanted to find out how much CO2 was created in the production of their prepared meal "noodles and wild salmon." Efficiency engineers examined the ships leaving harbor to fish, the storage freezers, and the energy consumption of the hatcheries – only to find that the most serious culprit was the cream from the local dairy, used in the recipe. Another example is the promotion of "local" apples. After six months in cold storage, they are more environmentally questionable than fruit flown freshly in from the southern hemisphere.

In all of these studies it becomes obvious that improving eco-efficiency is a multifaceted task. It must be carried out at any number of steps in the process and in many ways. Such "micro-greening" doesn’t make the matter any less important, only less glamorous. Working with the adage "the devil is in the detail" is probably the most significant – and practical – necessity in rescuing our earth. Modifying an entire supply chain to make it more sustainable means giving attention to literally thousands of details, from heat generation and insulation in distribution warehouses, to LED lighting and reducing the paper volume involved in invoicing. Yet this revolution of efficiency through many small steps is subject to criticism. Making more with less is a great idea, the objections go – but if "more" continues to increase, the benefits of "less" become negligible. Aircraft engines now consume 70 percent less fuel than 40 years ago, but global air traffic has actually risen by 70 percent during this same time period. Today, there are fewer cows in the United States than in the 1950s, but they produce more than twice as much meat and accompanying pollutants.

On the other hand, there is also some good news: For the first time in about two centuries, the last 24 months have seen the global economy manage to grow without increasing CO2 emissions to the same extent. This "eco-economic de-coupling" is our only hope in continuing to increase the world’s prosperity without consuming the resources of 1.5 earths, as has previously been the case.

Such silver linings are joined by the attempt to use not only fewer, but different resources: limiting consumption to materials that can be recycled, for instance. The cradle-to-cradle principle – the idea that the components of a product will become the source material of a new product – focuses on full recyclability and total biodegradability. The number of such ecologically neutralized goods is still very small. But the idea of making more of the right stuff, rather than efficiently making less of the harmful stuff, is gaining popularity.

Digitization has sparked another hope for dematerialization. The efficiency gains from digital technologies are spectacular in some cases. Processes that previously required days can now be done in minutes. Digital precision agriculture optimizes the fertilization of our farming land down to the square inch; and in industrial production, errors have been minimized. Despite all the prejudices, online shopping also supports dematerialization: a T-shirt that is delivered to a home by parcel generates 35 percent less CO2 than going to the store to buy it. The reason is simple and, like most things, has to do with our mobility: most buyers drive to stores by car and therefore pollute the atmosphere much more than a single parcel-delivery driver. However, advanced technologies can also lead to counterproductive effects. Drivers of hybrid cars in Japan, for instance, drive 1.6 times as many kilometers as they previously did in conventional cars, therefore eliminating the positive environmental effect of their investment. Once again: less of a "bad thing" quickly becomes more of a thing that is far from good.

Respect for our planet must then be based on more than technical efficiency measures alone. It must also include an awareness of our own behavior. This is perhaps the hardest – but most effective – part of saving our planet.

Christoph Kucklick is Editor-in-Chief of "GEO". The Bertelsmann publishing house Gruner + Jahr has published the reportage magazine since 1976, and every issue also carries stories on ecological topics.

Read more about eco-efficiency and other corporate responsibility topics in the magazine "24/7 Responsibility"  .