PETER DAUVERGNE and JANE LISTER
MIT Press, 2013, 194 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Every big retail brand name you can think of – McDonalds and
Starbucks, Coca-Cola and Nestlé,
Nike and Adidas, Disney and Google – are leading an apparent corporate charge
towards ecological sustainability, or so they would have us believe, say Peter
Dauvergne and Jane Lister in Eco-Business.
There is some substance to this business movement, they
conscientiously note, because it is more than just ‘greenwashing’, that public
relations sprucing up of a company’s environmental image to attract more
consumers. On offer with the
‘eco-business’ model is not just competitive branding advantage but lower input
costs and thus increased corporate growth, sales and profits.
Most of the big brands’ business costs, and their
environmental damage, is to be found in their supply chains (up-stream
production, packaging, shipping and distribution) and if a big brand can avoid
reputational damage, falling share prices and profit slumps (from toxic toys,
rainforest timber, ‘blood minerals’, etc.), and if cost savings through energy,
water and other efficiencies can be made, then the big brands will become
apostles for sustainability. Where there
is money to be made from going green, they will go green.
If it boosts their bottom line, they will even sup with the
devil. Partnerships between big corporates
and environmental organisations are now far from rare, with companies
purchasing the rights to display green logos in return for green cred. The World Wildlife Fund, for example,
partners with Coca-Cola, the WWF logo worth billions in increased sales to Coke
and $20 million from Coke to the world’s largest environmental NGO.
Whilst mainstream green groups describe their corporate
involvement as getting out of ‘the green ghetto’, Dauvergne and Lister show
that the green heavyweights are complicit in the corporate takeover of
sustainability. The growing corporatism
of the global environmental movement, through its own organisational model and
its co-option by corporate polluters, has moderated its earlier focus on
“radical transformation – such as reducing consumption, slowing resource use
and limiting economic growth – and opted to pursue incremental market-driven
advances instead”.
The fatal ecological flaw of eco-business, argue the
authors, is that sustainability is not possible within a world economy that
relies on a perpetually growing consumerism based on rapid obsolescence and
ever more turnover of retail goods.
Environmental efficiencies, which decrease per unit resource use, can
never keep pace with total growth in consumption through selling more TVs,
T-shirts and other stuff to more people, especially in the expanding consumer
markets of emerging economies such as India ,
China and Brazil
The authors make the best case they can for eco-business
(their book sandwiches copious lists of eco-business ventures between clunky
layers of business jargon) but in the end they conclude that eco-business is
all about “sustaining business, not ecosystems”. This valuable message remains relevant for a
green movement wanting to remain untamed by the lure of the corporate dollar.
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