As people become more climate-focused, the demand for sustainable businesses has skyrocketed, but the “carbon neutral” response from brands is often underwhelming.
It’s not just about greenwashing – that’s been around since the 1960s. Back then, it consisted of charming print ads: a photograph of a nuclear power plant romantically tucked away beside a lake. “Nuclear power plants are good neighbours,” read the text on the opposite page. “They are odourless. They are neat, clean and safe.” Today, the graphics have been updated, but the misleading sentiment remains.
Greenwashing is a huge problem – we know that. What’s less discussed is the invisible constraints being placed on the companies that are actually trying to make a difference. Often, sustainably minded brands do all they think is possible; they choose environmentally conscious suppliers, use recycled materials, limit production to items that have actually been ordered. But when it comes to the final few tonnes of CO2 that just won’t budge, they resort to questionable strategies such as buying carbon offsets, rather than pushing for a more innovative solution. It's an imperfect but workable approach (especially for younger, smaller brands), but there is another way.
Some companies take these kinds of shortcuts maliciously, greedily, sure, but many of them likely just have the wrong mindset. They believe that it's impossible to go climate neutral without the help of offsets and the like – and if something is impossible, then not achieving it is an acceptable result.
But there are other businesses who take a different approach, ignoring the limits of what’s considered realistic to eliminate emissions entirely. Auto-maker Polestar has committed to building a zero-offsets, zero-emissions car by 2030 in its Polestar 0 project; LanzaJet is working on a renewable aviation fuel powerful enough to go long haul; and The Bank of Åland has created a credit card that tells you to stop spending when you’ve reached your carbon limit.
“By pushing for a completely climate-neutral car, we are forced to be innovative even in the areas that might seem impossible today,” says Thomas Ingenlath, CEO of Polestar. “Companies must do their own work and eliminate emissions throughout the entire process, instead of shifting the problem elsewhere.”
Polestar is already a purely electric car-maker, but instead of sitting back and letting everyone assume its Lithium-Ion batteries were the greenest option possible, the brand divulged its carbon footprint. Its Lifecycle Assessment of the Polestar 2 revealed the car left the factory with the equivalent of 26 tonnes of carbon debt. That’s about equal to flying 100 hours in a Boeing 747. And while it's less than a factory-fresh SUV, it's still more than a smaller hatchback. As an electric car, the Polestar 2 isn’t going to keep racking up carbon debt like a petrol vehicle, but those 26 tonnes weren’t something Polestar was willing to cover up with carbon offsets.
“We think it’s imperative to our vision, our responsibility to co-workers and customers, and also good business sense to embrace transparency fully,” says Polestar’s Head of Sustainability, Fredrika Klarén. “It’s really one of those few black-and-white areas – you need to take a stand. Either you are transparent or not.”
The Polestar 0 project means changing manufacturing processes, finding new materials and running entirely on renewable energy. The battery is carbon-intensive to build, so Polestar’s engineers are working on a more circular way to design them, so they can be recycled and reused again and again.
Steel is another problem area. It’s a key component of each vehicle, but the process of smelting the metal is tough to clean up. It’s an issue the whole steel industry is still working on trying to crack. Most of the problems Polestar is trying to solve with the Polestar 0 project don’t have available answers yet. Right now, they are genuinely impossible. But Polestar is betting on the technology catching up.
Too many brands would instinctively shy away from this kind of decision, deeming it “too risky”, “too hard” or “too expensive”. But Klarén says it’s all about perspective: “We believe that too many companies and people look at the climate issue in a very linear rather than exponential way, and this holds us back.”
As futurist Ray Kurzweil explains in The Singularity is Near: “The future is widely misunderstood.” We intuitively expect change to be linear, a kind of gradual increase, when actually it is constantly accelerating. “Exponential growth is seductive,” writes Kurzweil, “starting out slowly and virtually unnoticeably, but beyond the knee of the curve it turns explosive and profoundly transformative.”
It’s this kind of exponential growth that meant, even though it took seven-and-a-half years to decode just one per cent of the human genome, the whole project was completed in just 13 years (when it was supposed to take 15). It’s what makes the impossible suddenly not only possible, but ahead of schedule. “A challenge like the Polestar 0 project will seem impossible if approached in a linear way,” says Klarén. “By applying exponential thinking to the climate issue, we are future-proofing ourselves.” Other companies should start doing the same.
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For more information, visit polestar.com/uk/sustainability
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
