Wednesday 2 December 2020

Has Aggregate Industries given up reporting CO2 emissions?


But what is a company to do when it is making no discernible progress on reducing CO2? Does it redouble its efforts, and scrap polluting schemes in favour of more sustainable ones? Or does the company give up publishing CO2 numbers altogether, sweep them under the carpet away from prying eyes, pretend they don’t exist? 

Has Aggregate Industries decided on the latter course? 

Around this time of year, Aggregate Industries would ordinarily report what progress – if any – has been made on reducing carbon emissions during the previous year.
 

The company claims "we're committed to tackling climate change", but its last reported numbers were still going in the wrong direction, as we posted in Climate emergency? Not at Aggregate Industries. CO2 emissions increase again.

But go to Aggregate Industries’ Sustainability Reports and Policies page and what do we now find? Not the back catalogue of sustainability reports previously there, nor a shiny new one for 2019. 

What we find instead is parent LafargeHolcim’s 2019 report – while Aggregate Industries’ CO2 numbers are suddenly nowhere to be found. 

We can obviously help with the back catalogue of reports – 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2000 – plotting Aggregate Industries’ CO2 journey: a company now emitting in the region of 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 each year, more than 5 times the amount it did in 1999. 

But has Aggregate Industries really given up reporting carbon emissions? 

Is it because the numbers stubbornly refused to fall despite best efforts, or is it because the company stubbornly refused to embrace more sustainable ways? 

Aggregate Industries' application to quarry Straitgate Farm would of course indicate the latter.
 
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