Monday 20 January 2020

LafargeHolcim: ‘We are accelerating our vision...’

Sound the trumpets. LafargeHolcim – parent company of Aggregate Industries – claims to be changing.


Is this more meaningless greenwash from LafargeHolcim’s CEO Jan Jenisch – at a time of growing outrage from communities already battling with climate change – or could the world's largest cement company really be committed to accelerating to a different, to a better, to a less harmful business model, in an attempt to keep up with the increased ambition voiced by other companies?


If LafargeHolcim’s idea of accelerating its #carbonneutral vision is hauling bog-standard sand and gravel a 46-mile round trip for processing – hauling "1.5 million tonnes of as-dug material" to a location that already has millions of tonnes of resource – then Jan Jenisch's words will indeed look like nothing more than greenwash.

The company's Sustainability Report 2018 claims "LafargeHolcim is at the forefront of efforts to mitigate climate change." You would hardly know. In 2018, LafargeHolcim's gross CO2 emissions increased to 135,000,000 tonnes, UP from 131,000,000 tonnes in 2017, UP from 127,000,000 tonnes in 2016. Total indirect CO2 emissions added another 30,000,000 tonnes.



Is LafargeHolcim doing anything to reduce its mind-boggling emissions? If it is, the company appears apathetically slow on the uptake – having seemingly only just discovered the merits of wind power in one of its largest markets:


In fact, the whole of page 28 of the company's 2018 Sustainability Report is devoted to these turbines, telling us of "the first LafargeHolcim operation in North America to harness wind energy.... which should eliminate the equivalent of at least 9,000 tonnes of CO2." Such savings pale into insignificance when only in the small print of the report does it become clear that LafargeHolcim's annual gross CO2 emissions have increased by 8,000,000 tonnes over the last two years.

Climate scientists warn we have little more than 10 years to turn things around. Given that a tree sequesters 0.060 tonnes of CO2 on average in the first 10 years of its life, LafargeHolcim would have to plant 6.55 billion trees to offset its last three years' emissions. If LafargeHolcim could plant 1 tree every second, the job would take more than 200 years!

It will need more than a few visions and wind turbines to deflect accusations of crimes against humanity:


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