What’s a circular economy and why are corporations so afraid…

So even the whispered threat of moving towards a circular economy where expected growth won’t be enough to dazzle Wall Street (but it’s still growth), corporations will use any number of methods to co-opt the language and define what sustainability is and what a circular economy looks like to help change the public view over their bad practices.

A great example of this co-opting of the language is this piece over at Pro Publica, When Is “Recyclable” Not Really Recyclable? When the Plastics Industry Gets to Define What the Word Means:

Companies whose futures depend on plastic production, including oil and gas giant ExxonMobil, are trying to persuade the federal government to allow them to put the label “recyclable” on bags and other plastic items virtually guaranteed to end up in landfills and incinerators. They argue that “recyclable” should apply to anything that’s capable of being recycled. And they point to newer technologies that have been able to remake plastic bags into new products. I spent months investigating one of those technologies, a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis, only to find that it is largely a mirage. It’s inefficient, dirty and so limited in capacity that no one expects it to process meaningful amounts of plastic waste any time soon.

That shouldn’t matter, say proponents of the industry’s argument. If it’s physically capable of being recycled — even in extremely limited scenarios — it should be labeled “recyclable.”

And there’s the petro-chemical industry defining the word “recyclable” for all of us.

Greenwashing is the best example of corporate language misdirection. Slapping a ‘green’ label on something, like plastic pet waste bags, does not make it green. It’s all sleight of hand to get you, the potential consumer, into thinking they care about the environment.

The only reason corporations exist is to make money for their shareholders. Period. Always keep that in mind. Which brings us to back to growth. What’s the saying, ‘growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell?’

It is interesting to note the almost cult-like wording and ideas around corporate growth. Growth is the corporate religion, based on this from McKinsey & Company, Choosing to grow: the leader’s blueprint:

The leaders who choose growth and outperform their peers not only think, act, and speak differently; they align around a shared mindset, strategy, and capabilities.

They explore and invest in opportunities both within and outside their core business. Their commitment to growth leads them to invest in an appropriate mix of enablers at the right time and scale, and they stay resolutely faithful to their growth vision in the face of unexpected challenges in their business and operating context, even turning disruption to their advantage.

Drawing on McKinsey’s extensive research into growth and leadership as well as our experience in partnering with leaders in every sector on sustainable, profitable growth, this article explores what happens when business leaders make and follow through on a purposeful choice to grow

Circular economies and sustainable initiatives frighten corporations a lot. It’s more of a money maker to extract, sell and throw away than to regenerate what you already have. Never mind the human and environmental costs.

In our current economy, we take materials from the Earth, make products from them, and eventually throw them away as waste – the process is linear. In a circular economy, by contrast, we stop waste being produced in the first place.

There’s a great article over at MIT Press Direct by Alice Mah, a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick and principal investigator of the European Research Council project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry,” titled Future-Proofing Capitalism. This article specifically is about the fossil fuel/plastics industry:

Faced with industry-level threats to public legitimacy and future markets, corporations across the petrochemical value chain have banded together to contain the circular economy policy agenda, appearing to be sustainable while proliferating unsustainable markets. Corporations have achieved this through deploying their advantage in technological expertise and understandings of complexity. The industry attempts to future-proof capitalism from the shocks of green transition by designing and controlling the new systems.

In other words, if they can define what it is to be in a circular economy or how that is achieved, they can, as Professor Mah writes, “future-proof” capitalism.