It isn't easy being green in the festive season, with consumption of wine, turkey and iPads having a huge impact on the environment. Saving the planet might have to wait until the New Year
Last Sunday my wife and I spent £360 shopping for the two-day bacchanalian orgy of eating and drinking that is Christmas in our house. As I loaded 23 carrier bags into the back of my ludicrously huge 4x4, I was struck by the futility of the fact that Sainsbury’s had insisted I use their ostentatiously recycled carrier bags. A nice touch you might think, but trying to be green at this time of year is akin to ordering a Diet Coke to go with your Big Mac and extra fries. It might make you feel better about yourself, but is unlikely to make much difference in the long run.
Let’s start with the turkey. Your average turkey is nether very bright nor very good at converting what we feed her into meat. One kilogram of bland, dreary turkey meat requires 4kg of grain. This inefficiency creates two problems: growing this 4kg of grain requires 20,000 litres of water, bags of fertiliser and a lot of diesel fuel. As a rule of thumb, only about 10% of the energy used in turkey farming ends up as calories in a turkey. The rest is wasted, mainly as heat, distressed clucking or turkey poo. This creates the second problem of getting rid of the poo, which is nasty and regularly contaminates rivers and lakes.
And don’t be reassured by the thought that although your turkey has been very wasteful of energy and grain, it’s all been worthwhile because she has had a carefree organic existence until now. I have visited numerous poultry farms over the years and, trust me, the free-range space given to your average turkey bears as much resemblance to the sunny picture on the packaging as the Salvation Army does to the SAS.
The rest of your Christmas Day spread is probably going to add up to about 6,000 calories in total. My guess is that you won’t manage to eat it all and your mother in law’s sprouts in roasted chorizo will end up in the bin adding to the eight million tonnes of food waste that were thrown away last year. Most of this goes into landfill where it cheerfully emits methane, which is 24 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.
So although you cannot eat your turkey or leave your spouts without a twinge of green guilt, you can at least drink a nice New World Chardonnay. No. No you can’t. Trans-global shipping of wine and bottled water is a big contributor to CO2 emissions. Last year the UK imported over 100 million cases of wine mainly delivered here by a huge fossil-fuel burning ship. This included over 30m cases that have travelled 10,000 miles from Australia or New Zealand.
Now don’t be under any illusions that your average Greek shipping owner is in the big green tent. He isn’t. He is not even on the campsite – he is in the nice bed and breakfast just up the road eating his full English whilst laughing at our attempts to install low-energy light bulbs and turn down the thermostat.
Although annual emissions from the world's merchant fleets have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO2, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions, the industry is fiercely resistant to emission-reduction targets. In response to loud anti-green lobbying, the UK government has wearily conceded that it was ‘deferring a firm decision on whether to include international aviation and shipping emissions within the UK’s net carbon account’. That’s a no then.
And after lunch, don’t be sitting down to play with your new electronic tablet or iPhone. Oh no. These all contain small amounts of copper, gold and rare earth minerals that, in turn, tend to be mined in grim locations by regimes with a somewhat relaxed attitude to environmental impact and human rights.
The worst example is the Congo, which, as well as hosting the most lethal war of our lifetimes, also happens to own 65% of the world’s reserves of tantalum, a metal that is present in tiny quantities in every electronic device you own. This little publicised but horrific war has gone on for about 25 years now and claimed the lives of at least 5.4 million people either directly or through consequential starvation and disease. As many as two million of these were under five years old.
Now it is too glib and simplistic to say these people are only fighting over the rights to the tantalum mines in the Eastern Congo and if you and I gave up our mobile phones they would all stop and work together to set up a Joseph Conrad theme park instead. It is more realistic to say that that at least some of the $3.4bn worth of minerals that is exported to the West every year is being used to fund the war, so a fraction of the £300 you recently spent buying a smart phone for your wife probably paid for a bullet eventually.
But let’s not be too hard on the mobile phone companies. The angry Congolese have been fighting over something for a long time now but it has always tended to be something that we in the West are willing to buy at this time of year such as gold, copper and diamonds.
And finally don’t buy anybody a present. Although we are predicted to spend £5bn buying Christmas presents this year, we are not an island of people who need more stuff. Last year, as a nation, we threw away over a million tonnes of broken or even just outdated electronic goods. Of this, as much as 100,000 tonnes is ending up in Africa being dismantled by little kids living on landfill sites. As well as the millions of TVs and laptops, we also threw away 1.1 million cars and 1.2 million tonnes of clothes. These embarrassing statistics are probably part of the reason why a lot of people in the third world are not too keen on us.
So let’s be all grown up and self aware about this. You may be the greenest person any of us knows, but at Christmas this is all going to go out of the window. Your consumption of New World wines, turkey and iPads is going to have an impact on the planet far in excess of what it may say on the label and, short of buying a whole species of goats for an African village, there is not much you can do to offset this.
My sage advice is to climb down from your pedestal for a couple of days and eat, drink and be merry alongside the rest of us. You can always go back to saving the planet on 2 January.
Michael Ware is corporate finance partner at BDO @michaelware13
