CSR threatening the environment

On my recent trip to Tescos, the plastic bags were fiercely guarded by the checkout assistants to make sure that you had to ask for one and reduced the number you use. According to the assistant, who was most indignant about handing them out, this is the next stage before ceasing their provision altogether. To protect the environment of course. Because Tesco takes its environmental responsibility seriously, I presume we are meant to believe. As I pointed out at length in my paper, Carbon, such corporate willingness to follow environmental dogma and CSR fashion regardless of the actual scientific facts, rather than to take a lead by doing what is actually best for the environment, is one of the greatest environmental threats we face. If huge companies like Tesco can't even be entrusted with environmental responsibility, what chance have we got.

The simple truth is that a lot of environmental dogma results from jumping to very simplistic conclusions without thinking about system wide effects. The obsession with removing plastic bags is part of this. It will actually increase the amount of CO2 in the environment, due to system wide effects of removing them. Think about it. You won't always remember your bags when you leave home. So you'll turn the car round and go back for them. If you do this even once a year, you've already eliminated any saving. And the saving was already pretty small, since like us you probably re-use the bags to bag your trash before putting it in the bin. And you'll probably have a large variety of much heavier duty bags stuffed in various corners around your home, each of which is the carbon equivalent of several shopping trips with the thin ones.
Now, you will have to buy rolls of bin bags to replace the ones you used to get at the checkout too.

If all the waste plastic we use is gathered, compressed into blocks, and dumped in the sea, it could reduce erosion, act as a synthetic reef before eventually building up into reclaimed land, and act as a carbon sink for thousands of years, and use zero landfill. The many paper bags that replace the plastic ones will have to be made and distributed so don't come with a zero carbon cost either, but they can't be re-used for refuse because they would tear with the first moisture going in the bin.

If Tesco was really serious about reducing waste, it would concentrate far more on reducing excessive packaging. But it shows little evidence of this in our weekly shopping trips -many things are still needlessly wrapped or even double wrapped. And according to other surveys, its own staff use far more bags than customers when bagging stuff up for home delivery.

The fact is that measures such as stopping provision of plastic bags for customers are trivial in their impact compared to reducing excess packaging and changing other corporate practices, but they are doing this because it will be highly visible and therefore come across to customers as evidence that Tesco is environmentally friendly. So it is little more than CSR spin, where the PR effect is far more important to the company than the environmental impact. That is why they have put so little thinking into the actual environmental impact. It is a mere sham, using the environmental bandwagon to maximising brand value, even if in doing so, the environment is harmed.

We can reasonable assume that most other supermarkets will follow the same path, pressurised by over-simplistic environmental pressure groups and CSR spin doctors.

Environmental managers in large companies are too closely linked into CSR, which is too closely linked into PR. While there is PR value in damaging the environment by following dogma and public opinion instead of offering a true lead via properly researched and implemented environmental practices, CSR will remain the opposite of what it claims to be.

Meanwhile, stupid but influential environmentalists remain one of the biggest threats the environment faces. Dogma 1, environment 0. What a shame!